


Saeglopur

by ABaskerville



Category: Aquaman (2018), Aquaman (Comics), Justice League - All Media Types
Genre: Atlantis has old dark secrets, F/M, Orm's actions have unforeseen repurcussions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2019-10-01 02:43:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17235842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABaskerville/pseuds/ABaskerville
Summary: Previously Sea and Darkness.Once, when he was foolhardy and young, Orm had gone to the Trench. He had no plan, no army; he had brought only his father’s trident and an anger that had consumed him. Most of the details had faded over time, but he would always remember the feeling of plunging into that deep darkness, all too aware of how small and alone he was.Now as he stood before her, all he could think of as she met his gaze fearlessly is that he was falling into that abyss all over again, his heart pounding in his ears and all his breath stolen away.





	1. The Woman in the Stone

It was a solitary ping that breaks Kaia’s concentration, so out of place in the silence. It was like metal hitting marble and it makes her look up in alarm, searching for the source of the disturbance.

In the center of the room under a spotlight was a massive stone block. When it had arrived at the museum last week, it had been an uninteresting shapeless thing relegated to the back room – just another piece of debris unearthed by the tidal wave that devasted the coastlines. No one knew that Diana Prince and her intern had been working on it until a lost assistant stumbled into their work. Now everyone wanted to be in on it, and Diana had taken to working with the door locked and then onward beyond normal hours.

Under the solidified layers of sand and stone and fossilized shell was the one of the most exquisitely carved likenesses Kaia had ever seen: a woman, laid to rest on the stone lid. The detail was staggeringly soft and intimate – that curve of her cheek, the fullness of her lips! – such that Kaia still finds herself staring sometimes, waiting for its chest to rise in an intake of breath.

Diana was brushing at a delicate hand, the bristles working away at dust. Across her was Hunter, chiseling away at larger debris. The clock ticks and tocks the passing time on the wall beyond.

Eleven fifty-one, it reads.

Kaia returns to her clipboard. To anyone else, it looks like the scribblings of a madwoman, but Kaia swears there was a system to it – a code to crack the equally convoluted markings around the sarcophagus. And she returned to the sea, It kept repeating, like a recurring conclusion to every verse, or a line from a poem or song.

There! A dull thud out of place, and she looks up again.

Hunter was tilting sleepily forward, eyes fluttering close. His brown curls brush against the lid, hammer held precariously by slipping consciousness. In front of him, Diana is unaware, brows furrowed in deep thought over a marble finger.

Hunter’s head lolls dangerously, and in a flash, Kaia’s arm darts out to catch the hammer before it hits the stone.

The boy’s head slams the lid and he jerks awake with a cry. A red spot is blooming on his forehead as Kaia wrestles control of the hammer, depositing it on top of her clipboard.

“That’s enough for you today, I think,” Diana tells her intern, woken from her own reverie.

“No,” Hunter protests, rubbing the forming bruise. “Seriously, I’m fine.”

“You were moments away from irretrievably damaging a priceless artefact,” Kaia deadpans. The very script marking its surface was more than a thousand years old. Her throat was still rubbed raw from the dust of decaying manuscripts she had to go through to find enough material.

“Come on, Kaia,” he huffs. “Just let me finish this portion. Give the hammer here.”

Kaia looks at Diana in inquiry. She herself was not moved, but Diana distractedly nods, looking at the woman’s hand again. There was a carving there – a ring, perhaps.

Hunter takes the hammer from Kaia’s clipboard.

She rolls her eyes and returns to her work for the third time, taking the pencil from behind her ear to draw a line from one strange mark to another and putting in a note to check out a rune the next day. The whole thing was terribly confusing; she had never seen a work so mish-mashed before.

Truthfully, she was afraid she might be making up connections up at this point. It was impossible for a stone coffin to have hieratic, Coptic, Greek, Latin and Viking in one place. They might actually be dealing with a fake.

Crack!

It sounds like an earthquake, like a mountain splitting open, stone breaking apart violently, and Kaia jumps out of her skin, her blood turning to ice. Hunter is staring in horror at the massive fissure on the lid.

“What have you done?”

She throws back her clipboard and gets to her feet to inspect the damage. Distantly, she hears the clipboard slide across a counter and clatter to the floor on the other end. The ground shudders, and she steadies herself on the stone, grasping the woman’s bare feet. Then she recoils. The lid was moving.

“Diana–?” she calls in alarm.

Diana is already on her feet, hands pushing back against the lid. It makes no difference. The darkness behind the lid yawns like a dark maw.

Her voice lashes out like a whip. “Both of you, _get_ –”

The lid flies out, sending Diana flying against the wall. Hunter screams – but against all odds, it is the wall that yields under Diana’s weight, collapsing around her in a rain of white powder.

The hair on Kaia’s nape stands up, and she looks down at the open sarcophagus as the faint outline of a woman rises up into the light. It was unmistakably the woman on the lid. The soft waving hair, black as night and floating like a halo around her. The full lips, the high cheekbones, and incredibly bright eyes, like liquid amber. Gold like the sun, like a ring, like fire burning in the distance.

Her skin, marked with the same runes Kaia had been working on for the past three days.

You.

A deep voice echoes in Kaia’s ears, probing, undeniable. She feels words torn out of her throat, her own voice strange to her ears, like something heard underwater. She knows she needs to break away, but her limbs are held tight by some unbreakable force.

Diana’s sharp voice cut through the thick air that enveloped the room and is quickly swallowed. In her periphery was another flash of gold, whiplike – a lasso? – and the woman flickers. Kaia gasps as something thumps against her chest, driving all breath from her lungs as the woman rises before her, gold eyes bright in the gathering dark that plunged the room into shadow.

Then there was nothing.

 

 

The strange quality in the air had gone, and Diana knows it’s too late even as she rushes forward and grips the coffin. Stone crumbles under her fingers as she searches and finds only ashes, and a single glinting gold ring. She picks it up with dread, recognizing the very ring on the stone lid.

“What the hell was that?” Hunter’s voice starts out a whisper and quickly climbs into something more terrified than a wail, his horror almost a physical ripple in the air.

Diana puts the ring into her pocket, then crouches beside the unconscious girl. Her pulse is weak, and her breath is shallow, but it’s there. “She’s alive,” she says with optimistic relief.

Hunter moves in her periphery and Diana’s hand darts out, catching his wrist. He drops the phone.

“We need to call the hospital,” he protests.

“And what will we tell them?” Diana asks, already pulling Kaia into her arms and getting to her feet. “I will take care of this. Inform the museum that we missed some structural damage in the stone, and it broke on its own.”

Hunter’s eyes are wide and fearful as he looks up. “I know who you are,” he whispers. “I saw the lasso. You’re the Wonder Woman.”

Diana fixes him with a stern stare. “Then you won’t disobey me in this.” She picks up the girl easily, barely a weight in her arms as she makes for the door.

“What are you going to do?” Hunter calls out after her.

“Get her to someone who can help,” Diana answers, feeling the heavy weight of the ring in her pocket.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the first time I'm writing a fic. Comments are appreciated!


	2. Unsteady Feet

When Vulko came into his room with a detachment of guards, Orm had stood with the full intention of being marched to his death with same fearlessness his mother had shown on hers. He had been waiting for it since he was shown into the gilded room that served as his prison, and with the blood of one of his most loyal captains still red against his hands, his white walls still steaming with laser blasts from the latest rescue attempt, he was certain Arthur had finally accepted that this was always meant to end with one of them dead. If it escapes his notice that the guard’s helmets were designed for surface air rather than the deep sea, he could be forgiven for his inattention.

Vulko’s face is unreadable as he led him quietly through long deserted halls and secret back doors cleared of servants and other witnesses, hinting that his fate was to be a secret until after the fact. _No matter_ , he tells himself. Death was death, and he was past his vanities.

At the royal dock, a seacraft waited, and Orm steeled himself for the Trench. They had brought him somewhere infinitely more terrifying.

Waves crash lightly around them, the wood creaking under the sudden weight of six Atlanteans. Orm blinks up at the glittering rays of the falling sun and sees the figures standing on a high balcony – his lost mother, silver hair glittering in the dying light, and his half-brother, arms folded, and feet set apart, surveying the water that now belonged to him.  

Their arrival spied, the pair quickly disappear into the building. Orm tries to keep his breath steady, his shoulders set as they wait at the edge of the walkway. Aboveground, the pull of gravity unsettles his balance. The waves are loud against his ears.

“Queen Atlanna,” Vulko calls out in greeting, and then his mother is there, crashing into him and pulling him close.

Orm holds himself still. He refuses lean into his mother’s touch, afraid it would elicit unnecessary violence when he was already so vulnerable. Her own visits in Atlantis had been a case in point enough as to the danger everyone thought he posed. The merest rise in his voice or unceremonious _thud_ of a plate and the guards came rushing in to form a protective circle around her, as if _he_ could ever raise a hand to his mother. Up in the surface, the guards would be even more wary, and the protocols would be stricter. Orm doesn’t mind being hurt, but his mother might be caught by accident.

Atlanna pulls back, and hooks her arm around him as Arthur approaches.

“Thanks for bringing him up,” Arthur tells Vulko. “We can take it from here.”

Vulko bows deeply. Disapproval emanates from the gesture. Orm could see it now, the subtle moods of his vizier that he had missed before. But Vulko obeys, as he always does, pulling the guards back into the sea. No doubt they will not go far, but for now, he is left alone with his mother and half-brother on the pier.

He was strangely resigned to his fate and met his half-brother’s eyes fearlessly.

“Hello, little brother.” Arthur’s eyes dart over his suit, but there was no blood there anymore. A change of clothes had been provided in the transport ship. “Let’s get you inside.”

Atlanna tugs at Orm, toward the white tower encircled by sea birds rising against the pink and orange sky. Orm takes only a second of compliance before he digs his feet in, brows furrowing. The very sight of the lighthouse recalls his childhood nightmares, knowing it was the place where his mother’s treason began. Her intentions sent a chill down his spine.

“No,” he tells them. “Finish this here. Now.”

Atlanna’s grip tightens, fingers icy, but it was Arthur who speaks first.

“I told you,” he says. “I don’t execute people.”

“Then call your guards back.”

“Obviously Vulko didn’t tell you why you’re here. He was probably waiting for me to change my mind until the last minute.” A corner of Arthur’s mouth turns up in a twisted half-smile. “I’m not going to execute you,” he repeats.

“Then _what_ are you doing?”

He glances at their mother, and an understanding passes. He inclines his head at Orm, then turns without a word.

Orm stares at his retreating figure. Atlanna puts her hand to his cheek and forces him to look at her.

“Your brother is taking a stand on your behalf.” Atlanna’s gaze is open troubled. “Vulko has been raising the possibility of civil war since Arthur took the throne, asking that Arthur do the right thing. He and Arthur disagree on what that is.” She kept her voice low, just enough for him to hear above the loud crash of waves. “It’s not just Vulko. It’s the Brine and Fishermen as well. You won’t know about the attempts because they never reached you, but after last night…Arthur is afraid one of these days they will.”

“A convenience he should allow to take natural course.”

“Your brother wants you safe,” Atlanna rebukes. “That’s why you’re here, where they cannot reach you. _Safe_. In time, your detractors will find other preoccupations, and–”

The unspoken truth of the matter hits like a physical blow, and Orm recoils as if scalded. “You intend for me to stay.”

“Orm–”

“On the _surface_. In _exile_!” His mother’s attempts to pacify him fall to no effect. Horror makes it hurt to breath, makes his hands fist in an urge to fight his way out of the nightmare. “You know the law. By rights–”

“I won’t sacrifice either of you to tradition. The world has changed. So should we.”

“ _I will not_ –”

“You have a duty to Atlantis. Do you deny this?” Atlanna cuts in, voice like a knife, expression like stone.

“Atlantis has a new king!” Orm snaps.

“Is being king the only thing that matters?” his mother demands. “Is that all there is in life for you?”

“It was all I had when I lost you,” he hisses back. He doesn’t mean to make the admission, not when he expects the raw grief it sparks in her eyes, but it was too late to take it back.

Atlanna’s hand falls away, and she stands back, trying to school her expression but failing. “I did everything I could to get back to you. To both of you.”

“But you chose _him_.”

The words hang in the air, and it’s Atlanna who looks away first, swiping a hand at her glittering cheek. His defenses crumble. Her eyes had gone red, her skin blotching, like sickness. His mother was weeping, and the horrible unfamiliarity of it makes him ashamed. 

“Supporting his claim to the throne to prevent a war with the surface is choosing you both. Supporting his claim to the throne to prevent a civil war is choosing you both.”

A bird shrieks above, piercing the subsequent silence. Orm knows there is no argument left for an old hurt, picked at and scarred but otherwise long dried. The blood wouldn’t come anymore, only the memory of the cut. There is no remedy to sooth it, only words that needed to be said and words that hurt to hear, and those words were the same.

Orm takes his mother’s hand, tangling their fingers as he used to do when he was a child. He wishes he had conducted himself better. He’d spent twenty years hardening his heart against her, telling himself that she’d betrayed him as much as she’d betrayed his father, and for that he was no longer worthy to be her mother, and still he found he’d be lying if all of it turned to dust as she wraps her hands around him and tries to recover herself.

“I won’t lose either of you a second time.” She whispers it like an old prayer at night, while she lay lonely and battered against a foreign shore, in a place that defied escape.

“I’m sorry that I wasn’t the one who brought you back, and he did,” he says. “And if nothing else, that makes him worthy of your preference.”

His mother thumps at his chest. “There is no _preference_. It’s not a competition. I love you both equally.”

“Just so,” he answers, with all the resignation of a diplomat who knows better than to argue with a distraught woman.

 

 

The interior of the lighthouse is modest, but well-lived in. It could fit inside a minor room of the palace, and it seemed even smaller for all the things that took up space in its corners. Orm never spent much time in his room and so had never accumulated sentimental things, and the prison had been almost bare. This room was such a vivid extension of its inhabitant that Orm is jarred, feeling like an intruder. In contrast, his mother loses some of her guardedness, finding more comfort in the crowded room than she ever did in the palace.

Arthur is behind a counter, fiddling at things with his back turned.

“You should be in Atlantis,” Orm says, cold with restrained emotion. If his brother wasn’t there to execute him, he shouldn’t be there at all. “You are barely three weeks into the throne, and that’s hardly enough time to rally the court behind you. There are treaties to ratify, nobles to pacify–”

Arthur’s turns with a pointed look. “I had to welcome by baby brother up here, didn’t I? Didn’t want him to think I had evil plans in store if I was nowhere in sight.”

“You are all up in my sight and I do still think that.”

“That’s because you’re naturally untrusting and it’ll take time to convince you,” Arthur rebuts. “But that’s fine. We expected that.”

“Tell me then, what do you have in plan?”

“Cultural assimilation.” He gestures grandly, almost theatrically as he said it. The wink at Atlanna does nothing to tamp Orm’s rising irritation.

“Which entails?” he prompts when it becomes obvious Arthur was not going to volunteer illuminating details to the notion.

Arthur shrugs and waves his hand vaguely around. “You’ve never been on the surface, not like this. There’s everything to learn – food, music, the internet…”

“And who is going to walk me through this?”

He arches an eyebrow. “Do you see any other half-brothers lying around?”

“I hope not. I cannot abide any more of you,” he answers forbiddingly.

He’s awarded by a roll of the eyes. “The answer is no, there aren’t, so you get me. It’ll be fun! We’ll bond over pizza and karaoke or something alike and hit as many birds with one stone as possible.” His attention had drifted, and so had his voice as he continues. “Movies and popcorn. Beer night. I should make a list.”

Orm looks askance at his mother, who blinks innocuously at him and only pats his arm.

“Anyway.” Arthur seems to have exhausted his ideas so far, and his voice had risen again in seriousness. “Despite the lack of planning as to your actual learning experience, we did consider the matter thoroughly. This is my dad’s house, you understand? So no fighting, no breaking things if we progress past a shouting match. There are things here older than god and I’ll be cast out and disowned if they’re caught in the crossfire.”

“It is only standard courtesy to respect other people’s possessions,” Orm answers with a curl of his lip. “I have no feud with material things anyway – but your father is a different matter. I am not sure you thought of that matter well enough.”

Arthur narrows his eyes. “It was either put an army around your room or bring you up here where most people can’t reach you. The first one would’ve taken a fortune, and getting a separate house with guards around the clock would also cost a fortune, so here you are – with the added bonus that mom gets to bond with her two sons at all hours of the day.” He folds his arms. “If you so much as raise your voice at my father, I swear–”

“You will kill me?” Orm fills in derisively.

“No. My mom will be disappointed.” He lifts his chin stubbornly at Orm’s answering scowl.

“Boys,” Atlanna warns.

A door opens somewhere, and Orm knows who it is from the way his mother straightens. She straightened for his father too, but in anticipation of a fight. She straightens now in anticipation of someone she had missed in the few hours they’d been apart.

“Oh, I’m late, aren’t I?”

Tom Curry steps in with his arms full, and Arthur is immediately at his side. The resemblance is striking: the deeper skin tone, the strange skin markings. Tom lets him take the packages and brushes his hands on his jeans, approaching with a smile.

All his life, he’d promised that he’d kill Atlanna’s human lover if they ever met, and now he could see how easy it would be. Arthur is looking at him sternly over the man’s shoulder, a silent warning. Even so, if Orm decided to reach out, he wouldn’t be able to do anything.

Instead he held himself still, on behalf of his mother.

Tom brushes a hand on Atlanna’s cheek, still tear-stained. “Everything all right?” he asks gently.

“Yes,” Atlanna says. Her voice is warm with affection. It makes his stomach turn unpleasantly, bile rising up his throat. “Tom, I want you to meet Orm.”

The man considers him, something protective behind his eyes. The reservation is to be expected; no doubt they had told him of what Orm had done. What he still thought was the right thing to do. But then the man stretches out a hand, an offered truce. Orm is mildly surprised. The man must know he would never take it, and he doesn’t. He would yield to his mother, but not to her human lover.

Atlanna sighs sadly and Tom shakes his head imperceivably, retracting his hand. He offers Orm a warm smile instead, misgivings safely tucked away. “It’s alright. You’ve been through a lot. We’ll work through it slowly.”

“That all well and good, but can we hurry about the food,” Arthur calls out. “A welcome dinner can’t happen without dinner.”

Tom rolls his eyes in the exact same manner of his son, commenting “Are you really that well-meaning concern for your brother or is that your own stomach complaining?” even as he moves toward the counter now filled with seafood.

“Both,” Arthur answers unapologetically as he hands a block of wood and a knife.

“Come on,” Atlanna tugs at his arms, pulling them close to see better.

The two men settle into a rhythm, knifes and jars passed between father and son. The salt is rubbed over the fish, the squid gutted and cleaned, several vegetable varieties chopped and set aside. Throughout the process, Arthur makes a running commentary that he could almost believe is purely for his mother’s sake, if not for the glances stolen at him, gauging his attention. Orm listens, notwithstanding the turbulent thoughts floating at the back of his head. It was not only troubling to hear his brother speak with any kind of expertise, not after years of convincing himself his brother was a complete idiot unworthy of care or affection, but he had to consider the sincerity of the gesture as well.

In Atlantis, there was a deep cultural value placed in the preparation of food, making it invaluable in the creation of intimate relationships. It was a primary opportunity for a host to cement trustworthiness by preparing food personally, with the resulting dish considered an offer of friendship. Even at court, the quality of a feast was indicative of a host’s welcome. In discussion of alliances, it was common practice for the host himself to take significant part, personally hunting a rare creature or spice for the main dish as a sign of regard. It was possible that this coincidence was all based on Arthur’s human upbringing, but his instinct tells him his mother also had a hand in the matter.

It was hard to judge. If his mother had had a hidden agenda, she had partly forgotten it, losing herself in the preparations herself. It was just like her. At one point, Tom drops the knife in apparent alarm, catching Atlanna by one of the apparatuses. “I can do that, Atlanna.”

“No, no, I have it,” Atlanna dismisses. She fiddles with the controls, and Orm recoils as fire nearly catches him. He had been watching closely, overcome by curiosity to see how the device works.

There’s silence, then Arthur is roaring out a laugh. It echoes around them, bouncing through the walls, loud and inescapable. Orm holds himself apart, decidedly unamused. While there was fire in Atlantis, it always tempered with the predominant protection of water. In the surface, fire was fed by air, making it raw and untamable, and a cause of unease for a creature of the sea.

“Don’t turn it all the way up next time,” Tom says with a chuckle. Orm searches his face, but there is nothing but amusement. There was no anger, or threat of violence, and he relaxes once he realizes he didn’t need to block a blow for his mother.

Atlanna, safe in the knowledge of the affection afforded to her, has already moved on from the incident, flitting through the room taking crockery from the cabinets, setting them close to the cooking. Smells were beginning to waft through the room, vivid and pleasant to Orm’s reluctant admission. If it had looked and smelled bad, at least by Atlantean sensibilities, he could convincingly decline the ordeal of a long-drawn out dinner – but it smelled wonderful and it looked familiar enough, again likely by some prior arrangement of his mother, and Orm cannot find any convincing excuse when Atlanna herds him out to the dining area, previously set by Atlanna or Arthur (he couldn’t tell because they never stopped moving around), and sat down at a chair.

Arthur switches on several lights, bathing the room in warm tones, and with his mother beaming at the arrangements, it was strangely…cozy. Like a version of home he had imagined as a child, patterned from a book or glimpsed from the window of a fast-moving carriage. To be faced with the reality was surreal, and he wonders if the headiness is traceable to exposure from the steam of cooking and the heat from the electric lights and this being the longest he’s gone from the water in living memory.

Atlanna taps his arm, and nods at the food set out in from of him. It wasn’t that he particularly feared poison at this point. He didn’t care if Arthur had slipped a powder into his food when he wasn’t looking. Death was already marked in his mind, and he had no fear of it. His reluctance is borne from something else: a memory of his father, warning him that it always starts with one step, one taste. A gesture acknowledged opening the door for future exchange.

For a moment, he allows himself to accept the scene in front of him as it is, his brother judiciously tucking into his food while shooting him glances, Tom looking at his son oddly for his behavior, and Atlanna waiting for his next move. What if he allowed himself to learn about the surface, erasing everything he’d ever learned secondhand from his prejudiced upbringing? Arthur would try to show him the best his world can offer, and Orm would counter with something Atlantis does better.

What was a choice anyway? If he refused this, they might send him back. He’d be in Atlantis, but to what end? He would never be executed, only kept in a room till old age took his stubborn soul or an assassin – who cared anymore who sent one? Orm had lived his whole life with one foot in the grave whenever he closed his eyes – shortened the wait.

What was pride? Pride was dying for nothing, his best intentions thwarted, Atlantis in the hands of a well-meaning, but dangerously naïve king who knew as much about Atlantis as Orm knew about the surface.

What was ignorance? Ignorance was refusing to learn any further. Who knows if this knowledge of the surface might come in handy for his unchanged goal one day?

He picks up the spoon, and without allowing himself a chance to turn back, he takes a sip.

He had barely swallowed when Atlanna leans in. “Well?”

“It will do,” he says.

He won’t look, but Arthur’s grin is visible even from his periphery. “Welcome to the surface, little brother,” he hears him say, his voice warm as the soup on his tongue.

 


	3. Unexpected Guests

The dinner was, to some extent, a success. Orm means this in the sense that no knives had been brandished and no one had slumped into the table blue-faced and foaming at the mouth. Conversation was light. It was accepted that common ground couldn’t be carved in a single evening, and silence was better than the risk of offence.

Atlanna was heartened enough to wave him away from the table when it was finished, explaining that he need not overreach himself on the first day.

“But no excuses for the next few days!” Arthur calls out.

It was made in good-natured humor, and Orm lets it slide. Anyway, his brother would find out first-hand how difficult he can be about things he does not agree with. Orm by silent non-protest had accepted that he will stay and learn what he can about the surface, but that did not give Arthur any more authority or command over Orm that he would allow.

It would be amusing to make his brother squirm. Orm needed something to occupy himself besides.

Orm steps out into the pier, grateful for the solitude. The wind is cold and crisp, the world an endless canvas of blue, broken by glittering stars above, and white cresting waves below. Water sprays him as he walks to the edge, feeling his limbs grow heavier with each step as he forced himself not to jump. He yearns for the sea, and always will, but he had made his choice to stay, so he will stay.

As he ponders his next steps, the water begins to ripple in an unnatural current. By the time he takes notice, it was churning, rising up like a wall. Orm staggers back as it suddenly crashes at his feet. To his surprise, it left behind a body.

Her eyes were bright in the moonlight, gold ringed, hair like seaweed tangled around her arms as she held on to the edge; some wild thing or deep-water creature washed ashore gasping wetly for breath as if its lungs were not made for such air.

Orm feels a too recent memory claw its way back to the present. Was this another attempt on him? It couldn’t be. This was only a girl, fingers scrabbling at the wood. He finds himself kneeling on the pier, reaching out. Her hand almost slips – Water? Blood? In this light, he couldn’t tell – and he tightens his hold until her slender, fragile bones press against his palm. She squeezes back with surprising will as he pulls her out of the capricious sea.

The fog of his disorientation clears when she collapses against him: the subtle alterations in the skeleton, the angles of her limbs, the material of her clothes. Demanding questions rise from his throat as she heaves over his arm, expelling water.

“Who are you?”

Her next cough is dry, the next inhale clear of water, her fingers scramble over the smoothened plates of his Atlantean suit, and the words die in his tongue as words form in her hers. Or almost do.

She faints, not heavy like the dead, but light, light as something filled with air. She lolls as he shifts, revealing a near bloodless face, as if all warmth had bled from her. _Blood_ – the movement exposes the red blossoming on her loose white shirt.

He looks at the sea in consternation, but waits only for a beat, the warmth seeping through his fingers forcing a decision. It takes very little effort to lift her and turn back to the lighthouse. The more burdening issue was the voice at the back of his head, asking him what he was doing. It had the voice of his father.

At the threshold, he kicks the door open wider and the breeze slams it against the wall, startling Arthur from stupor in the couch. Orm feels his alarm as he crosses the room, trailing puddles, raising a ruckus as he sweeps the things off a table and lays the girl in it.

“Is that a _girl_?” Arthur exclaims, his footsteps announcing his approach.

Orm’s attention wavers between the implications on his actions and the instinct to study the girl in better light: dark hair framing her face, breath rattling from slightly open lips. Nothing at all like the weather-worn sailors he’d seen before. He had not thought surface dwellers could be anything but rough and ungainly. She was almost beautiful.

Arthur was talking, and Orm clears his head for a moment to listen.

“Where’d you find her?”

Orm gestures toward the pier.

Suddenly, the front door wracks under thunderclap sharp raps. A deep female voice rings out clear through the heavy wood, calling, “Hello?”

Arthur’s mouth drops. He crosses the room in a few long strides and snaps the door open.

Beyond was a woman, tall and sturdy, with a long braid pulling her hair back from a striking and attentive face. She was dripping wet, a heavy coat draped under her arm.

“Diana?” Arthur is evidently familiar with her, though surprise is plain on his expression. “What are you doing here?”

“I need your help,” Diana says. At that moment, her eyes dart inside the room, catches sight of Orm, then slides down at the unconscious girl. A gasp escapes her and then she’s pushing Arthur out of the way, swallowing the distance with large steps.

Orm is just as fast. In a moment, he had her way blocked, feet apart, fists at his side. Arthur nearly sends them sprawling in his haste to intervene.

“It’s okay, Orm,” Arthur tells him quickly. “This is Diana, she’s a friend.”

The woman called Diana gestures urgently toward the girl. “May I see her? She is why I am here.”

Arthur steps aside, but after the first altercation Diana extends enough courtesy for Orm to stand down before rushing forward. Her hands hover above the girl in meticulous appraisal. Orm retreats, places himself out of the way but in close proximity.

“Where did she get this?” Diana asks Arthur, cutting his own questions. “We have to tend to it immediately.”

Orm’s attention drifts at a creak on the stairs. Tom Curry stands on the upper landing, a curious look on his face. Atlanna was right over his shoulder, an Atlantean comm at her hand.

“Mom, dad, this is Diana Prince,” Arthur introduces by way of explanation.

Recognition lights up Tom’s face where Atlanna remained skeptical. Tom explains to her, half-turning, “It’s the Wonder Woman.”

Neither name nor title rings a bell to Orm, and Atlanna was clearly of the same situation.

“You are an Amazon,” his mother says instead, and this time, Orm arches an eyebrow. That, he knows something of, and he looks at the woman with renewed attention, finally understanding the threat he felt at her arrival.

“I apologize for barging in like this, but the matter cannot wait till morning,” Diana promptly responds. “Last night, we accidentally opened a sarcophagus and unleashed a spirit–”

Arthur recoils, face going a strange gray hue. “It possessed her?”

Diana shakes her head. “I do not know. The revealed crest marked it as Atlantean. I was hoping you would have answers.”

Atlanna bends over the unconscious girl, studying the wound. Over her shoulder, Tom arches an eyebrow. “It’s similar to the one you had when I found you,” he observes.

“Yes,” Atlanna concurs, brows furrowing in consternation. “But I don’t understand. Our guards wouldn’t attach a surface dweller.” She looks at Diana in inquiry.

“It’s a mystery to me as well,” Diana admits apprehensively. “She hadn’t stirred since the museum, but the moment we reached the coast, she became violent. I think – I think she called the wave that pulled our car underwater, where I lost her.”

Atlanna’s face shuts in deep thought, then decisively, she commands, “I’ll need bandages, a change of clothes and tea for our guest,” and the room moves to follow.

Tom rushes back up for bandages and clothes, and Arthur starts to come after him when Atlanna stops him and commands him to talk to the alarmed guards who’d woken her. Arthur disappears through the pier door instead, and Orm finds his mother’s attention on him again.

“If you would turn your back for a moment, son,” she bids him.

He strides to the pier door, hovering at the door frame and watching his brother take a call beyond, a shadow dimmer than the sea-tinted darkness. From behind, he hears the sound of ripping cloth. His uselessness at the moment was giving rise to irritation, though in no small part, he recognized his own exhaustion tearing at his temper.

Murmurs, and Tom’s footfalls on the stairs. Orm allows the movements of the house to float around him, aiming for detachment. He could have a long night ahead of him yet. His mother would question him later, he knew. He tried to think back, but the details were bent at the edges, leaving only bright points of focus – the sound of the waves, the gold in her eyes, her hand stretched out in the dark – all of it felt uncomfortably intimate, burrowing under his skin.

He doesn’t notice Arthur until he’s in front of him, frowning. “You okay, little brother? You’re spacing out.” He cocks his head. “You don’t have to stay up. We can handle this.”

Orm hooks a hand back into reality and pulls himself back to the present. “I’m fine,” he says darkly. “The woman who came in, she is your friend?”

“I think so,” Arthur answers, glancing inside. “We work together.”

“You work?”

“Don’t give me that tone,” Arthur gripes with a scrunch of his face. “I met Diana some months back during Steppenwolf’s invasion. Another member of the group, Bruce Wayne, had been investigating the mother stones. He tried to recruit me, but it wasn’t until the one in Atlantis was taken that I threw myself in with them.”

“This Bruce Wayne, he’s a surface dweller?” At Arthur’s confirmation, Orm expresses reservations. He had known of the matter and set defenses against an attack on Atlantis. Reports indicated that he had been repelled, but there was no mention of who faced him. This was new information to him. “And he stood against Steppenwolf?”

“It was a group effort. Me, Diana, Bruce – who’s known as the Batman, Clark – who comes from another world, and Barry who’s super-fast and Victor who’s part cyborg.” Arthur exhales. “Actually, if I had failed to stop you, it was very likely you’d have met them sooner.”

“How so?”

“Well, there’s no formal agreement about it, but we’re all sort of supposed to stop things like that. Full-scale wars and whatnot. Mostly though, everyone keeps to their own turf. Batman’s busy enough fighting crime in Gotham, and Barry’s in school and etcetera.” He peers over Orm’s shoulder. “Come on, I think they’re done.”

Orm immediately finds the girl, clothed in what might be his mother’s old surface clothes, still unconscious, but slowly regaining a less dangerous color. Tom is just coming out of the kitchen, carrying a tray with several mugs, with Diana right behind him. Orm files away what Arthur had told him about the group he’s part of for further study. It was certainly a potential issue he hadn’t factored into his plans before. An Amazon could cause immense damage, and there was something about this one that seemed…different. He couldn’t quite place it; the air seemed to spark and sputter when she moved.

The Amazon catches his gaze as she finds her own seat, and nods courteously. “I apologize for earlier.”

He inclines his head wordlessly in return.

“Now, explain,” Atlanna commands Diana while she pours steaming brown water into the cups.

The Amazon launches into her tale, reiterating what she’d said in brief earlier. “A few days ago, a large slab of stone was delivered to our museum on instructions from a seaside town’s mayor. It had been mistaken for debris and taken a hatchet to before they realized it was carved exquisitely under the brine. The team that worked on it was small, just me and my intern Hunter, and Kaia. Last night, the seal broke, and the lid yawned open. Hunter swears it wasn’t him, and I think there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’s telling the truth.”

She described the strange change in the air, the shadowy woman, and the pulse of power she unleashed. There was nothing left in the sarcophagus except for a ring, which she showed them then. Orm leans forward in spite of himself, drawn to the gold winking in the light. The sound of water drowns out the rest of Diana’s words, and Orm frowns, straining to hear.

Atlanna’s hands suddenly dart out, enclosing Diana’s hand around the ring, and Orm releases a breath he did not realize he was holding.

“Orm,” Atlanna calls, and Orm washes his face of all emotion as she bids him come closer. “Do you recognize it?”

It was noticeably the triple point trident of the king, but with an arc crossing the blades like a crescent moon. Something nags at him, the tail-end of a dream, a word at the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t catch hold of a name or a reference, so he shakes his head. “It must be very old. Burials became rare after we sank into the sea, and of the Houses that still keep the tradition, none use this crest,” he says. “The records-keepers might know otherwise, however.”

Atlanna proffers the ring to Arthur, but he only blanched and shook his head. “If you two can’t recognize it, I probably won’t.”

“Arthur has a fear of dead things,” Tom volunteers in a dry teasing tone.

“I don’t like it when they don’t stay dead,” Arthur corrects crossly. 

“If I had known earlier that it belonged to you, I would’ve terminated the project immediately,” Diana rejoins. “I assumed it was merely a displaced relic, judging by the traces of Sumerian and Egyptian. I can’t tell you how much I blame myself now.”

“Well, she’s welcome to stay, of course,” Tom offers, redirecting the discussion. “While you figure everything out. Moving her isn’t advisable at this point.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Diana admits. “Frankly, I meant for her to be here either way. Such things…they usually leave a mark. I want to be certain she’s alright.”

“What mark?” Arthur cuts in tensely. “She’s not going to turn into a mummy or anything, is she? That’s just Hollywood stuff.”

Diana arches an eyebrow at him. “Of course they are. But this one wouldn’t be a mummy. The woman I saw was dressed in regalia, and painted in runes.”

“Do you remember what they said?” Atlanna prompts.

Diana shakes her head. “That was Kaia’s work, and I left everything at the museum in haste. I can have Hunter send them in tomorrow instead, or better yet, the sarcophagus itself.”  

Atlanna considers it, then shakes her head. “A hologram would fare better in transit. I’ll give you a device for that.”

“And the sarcophagus?”

Orm shakes his head. “We can’t leave that in human hands.”

“It might have other traps as well,” Atlanna agrees. “In the meantime, it should be kept in a secret place, away from other interference.”

Diana nods. “I’ve already had the room secured off from the other staff. I’ll have it moved elsewhere when I return.”

Atlanna stands and the others begin to relax. Tom asks in passing, “How much will you tell her when she wakes?”  

Diana inclines her head at him. “I was just about to ask if I can stay as well, for when she does. What I tell her is all up to you,” she says, directing the last at the Atlanteans.

Orm realizes the conundrum, and purses his mouth in disapproval when his mother gives the answer he expects and dreads.

“Do you vouch for her?” Atlanna asks the Amazon.

“I’ve already known her personally for three months, but Her mother was a famous conservator, and her own record is astounding,” Diana says. “I believe she can be trusted.”

It was enough for Atlanna. “Then if she remembers anything of what happened, we will tell her the truth.”

Orm’s own protest is overrun by Arthur’s by a second. “You think she’ll take it well? I mean, it’s a pretty fantastic thing to dump on someone who’d seen a ghost, been shot at and nearly drowned in the course of one day.”

“There is no way to explain the wound anyway,” Tom points out. “Unless you haul her back to a hospital while she’s still unconscious.”

Atlanna shakes her head. “And that tidal wave that pulled you into the water – it concerns me. The risk is currently greater in letting her out of our keeping without knowing more about the sarcophagus and the woman.”

“It’s settled then,” Tom says with a resolute clap of his hands. “Shall we all turn in? Orm must need rest – I remember how unstable Atlanna was on land – and there’s nothing else we can do till morning.”

“I can take watch tonight, and Diana can stay here with her friend,” Arthur volunteers.

Diana shakes her head. “The floor is fine. I’ve had worse.”

Arthur waves it off. “I should go anyway. I forgot to say earlier – two guards didn’t report for the last hour, and their comms are turning up nothing but static. A quick sweep of the bay wouldn’t be bad, just in case there’s a problem. I can bring Diana’s car to a mechanic early morning too.”

“Two guards?” Atlanna repeats. “Do they have any leads?”

Arthur shakes his head. There were no theories offered, but Orm notes how several gazes travel toward the unconscious girl, then at Orm, weighing the odds.

“It might be nothing,” Arthur dismisses in a clear bluff. “It’ll probably resolve itself by morning.”

The group disperses after, the extended hours sinking into everyone. Arthur cleans up, and Atlanna drags Diana off about a change of clothes while Tom mentions more blankets. Orm is left alone with the girl, mulling over the situation as he notes the calmer rise and fall of her breathing. He doesn’t quite know how to feel about the current complication. There were enough surface dwellers who know about them as it is.

“I’m glad you saved her.”

Orm turns and Atlanna is there, Tom’s back already disappearing up the stairs. Arthur and Diana are just returning from the kitchen, heads bent intently together, deep in conversation.

Orm says nothing, and Atlanna smiles anyway. “I’ll take you to your room.”

She takes his hand and pulls him upstairs, up to the second floor. His body is heavy, like something dragged behind his will. He counts three doors, one of them with a door ajar was a bedroom. At the end of the hall, she bids him climb a much narrower stair, and he has to bend to keep himself from hitting his head.

He emerges to a room with steepled ceiling. A bed is pushed by a small circular window, sheets new and fresh, but Orm still knows who it belongs to. His mother pulls him to the bed, and sits by him, softly lit by the moonlight.

“Sleep well tonight,” she murmurs. “You’re safe here.”

She shows him a change of clothes, then shows him another pair for tomorrow. He waits for her to close the door quietly behind her, before he struggles against his exhaustion and conducts a thorough study of the room, it’s corners and entryways, its exact width and breadth and arrangements, setting out a plan for defense. It was a calming habit, and it used the last of his strength, leaving no more room for thoughts or misgivings.

He considers for a moment the change of clothes. It was all too easy to judge himself too tired for the additional effort, but Orm was nothing if not dedicated to a path once he’d decided to take it. He strips the Atlantean suit and tries not to think how it feels like stripping himself of his identity as he pulls on the loose change of clothes. Who he was, wasn’t defined by what he wore. No matter how much they changed his appearance, he wouldn’t change in the ways that truly mattered.

At the last of his strength, he falls into the bed and was asleep immediately.

 


	4. A Plan For the Meantime

Kaia has been awake for some time, but neither Diana or Atlanna or any of the others knew that. She was good at keeping panic to herself, and she _was_ in panic.

When she woke up in a couch wrapped in woolen blankets– knowing full well she’d never owned any– in place that smelled of the sea and old wood– when she all her projects involved deserts– and no memory at all of how she’d gotten there, she felt the unfamiliar strain of fear. Since she was a child, she could wake up and remember everything with startling clarity. What she ate for dinner, what she read by the bedside lamp and what page she stopped. The date that passed, the dreams she’d dreamt. Even if she were sick, she remembers with certainty if she’d taken her medicine before she fell asleep, and exactly how many pills she had left to take.

But not now. There was just...a blank. Her heart is pounding in her chest and she has to _think_ herself into breathing, because she should know _something_.

There were the things she remembered last. Eleven fifty-one on the clock. The ping, the thud, and the crack, like auditory hallucinations. The runes copied in her hand. Hunter nearly breaking the sarcophagus– nearly? No. He _had_ cracked the sarcophagus. There had been a yawning maw of darkness as the lid flew back, knocking Diana against the wall. Was _she_ alright? She couldn’t see past the woman.

The woman…

This is where her memory ends. Beyond was a sheet of darkness which she regards with caution. This was the blank in her memory. She returns to the last thing she remembers. The woman’s gold eyes staring into her, and she unable to look away. The clock ticking in the background, unnaturally loud. Diana shouting. Suddenly, her body seizes in remembered alarm. A voice screaming in her head, the roar of an underwater current, water in her lungs, the lighthouse and the fire, fire everywhere. Her stomach is burning, clenching on itself from prompted impact, heavy blankets suffocating, pressing around her. She couldn’t breathe.

“Kaia?”

Hands ghost over her arms and she lashes out, filled with the memory of drowning. The world tilts – then explodes into white light as she falls heavily. The impact shuts out all sound save for a ringing in her ears, and the thump of blood behind her eyes reboots everything. Someone is heaving for air. She realizes it’s her. Her muddled sight takes in a spinning world. A part of a grinning mask, white-washed walls, and Diana standing over her.

Amazon, island, colleague, golden lasso.

golden lasso, Wonder Woman.

She’s lifted easily, blankets and all, Diana’s face a blur above her as she tries to focus, pinpricks needling into her skull, as she’s placed back on the couch.

“Take deep breathes,” Diana prescribes. “It’ll calm you.”

Distantly, she knew the logic of the command, but her mind was still caught in the threads of memory. The jarring vividness of the fall into the water, her hands tearing at the seatbelt and smashing the glass of a car, mad with single-minded focus. Her lungs can’t get enough air.

woman. coffin. lasso. water. Atlantis. lighthouse. fire.

“Kaia.”

She pushes back against the hand bidding her to lie back down, trying to recollect her train-wreck of thoughts.

There was fire. So much fire, and blue eyes.  

But that’s beside the matter. It was Atlantis that was important. Why? Atlantis was a myth. Myth? That crazy man – Steven – Stephen? – he believed in it. _Why_?

Did he open a sarcophagus too?

The implication startles her, and even more so when she instinct accepts it against her logical self. She opens her eyes, sweeping the room. There are the open windows, a door leading out into the sea. Diana sits patiently at the end of the couch, watching her face.

_Am I mad? I can’t be mad._

“I’m not mad,” she says aloud, rasping out the words on sandpaper tongue.

“You’re not mad,” Diana confirms. “It’s October 12 at one-thirty in the afternoon and you’re in Amnesty Bay.”

“Why?”

“Because we opened something we shouldn’t have. A sarcophagus that belongs to Atlantis.”

Atlantis. An image flashes at the back of her mind, accompanied by a gut-wrenching yearning that is more than academic fixation. Atlantis, a myth. Atlantis, an explorer’s dream. Atlantis – a place she could find, if she could get a ship, because she couldn’t swim. Couldn’t she?

“Kaia,” Diana calls as she reaches out, pulling her back to the present. “What are you thinking?”

“Is this where Stephen Shin lives?” she asks.

Diana shakes her head. “No. This is where Arthur Curry, also known as Aquaman, lives.”

Stephen wasn’t mad if Diana believed him. So Kaia wasn’t mad either. But that’s not saying much now.

“What’s wrong with me then?”

Diana’s brows furrow for the first time in obvious concern. “Do you think there’s something wrong with you?”

Yes.

“Diana,” Kaia says, opting for as much reasonableness as she could with fear making a furnace of her veins. “I would be home if there wasn’t.”

Diana leans back, studying her. Kaia tries to sit still, to resist the urge to shake the answers out of her. Finally, Diana nods imperceivably.

“I will tell you everything.”

 

 

Orm jerks awake with alarm, fingers brushing under the pillow for the knife and finding nothing. His eyes sweep across the unfamiliar room, thrown into brilliant clarity from the sunlight streaming through the window.

Sunlight.

Memory rushes back like a tidal wave, and he slumps back on the bed with a groan, willing himself back to sleep so he can wake to a better reality. But the bed dips with an unfamiliar outline too – his brother’s most likely – and he scrambles off to his feet, feeling chills crawl up his skin.

It’s too fast – vertigo makes the room spin. He keeps his footing, hand against a bed post to steady himself. When the room had righted itself, he tests his limbs, feeling his muscles protest against the pull of gravity.

Arthur’s life was evidenced all around him, littered with knick-knacks and mementos of a child that had grown into a man through the passage of years. A small portrait framed by the desk catches his attention, and his breath catches when he leans closer. It was his mother, still young, untouched by years. It had caught her mid-laugh, and there was something so carefree about her face that Orm is horrified at the contrast against his memories of the queen standing beside his father.

He steps back, grits his teeth and finds himself tired of looking at Arthur’s things. The air inside was suffocating, even though there was a breeze coming through the windows.

There was no one on the second floor, and he couldn’t hear anyone in the immediate vicinity, so he walks through the hallways, peering into rooms. It wouldn’t take too long to memorize the house, and this was as good a time to do it as any other. He finds the master bedroom but doesn’t enter, settling for a sweep of the room.

On the ground floor, he nearly collides with Arthur, who’s coming in from the living room with a tray of half-eaten food and an empty glass.

“Afternoon, sleeping beauty,” Arthur greets after an initial moment of shock. “Want some lunch?”

Orm could hear voices from the living room, low and female. When he couldn’t catch the words, he follows Arthur into the kitchen. “What did you call me?” he demands.

“What, sleeping beauty?” Arthur clarifies. His back was turned as he tidied up. “It’s an expression we use for people who sleep for a really long time. It’s closer to dusk than noon, you know. You were so knocked out, I honestly thought you were dead when I came up this morning.”

“You were in my room?” Orm bristles. Was he to have no privacy then? Even under arrest in Atlantis, guards had knocked and left if he did not answer. How vulnerable he must’ve been, sleeping through it all.

“Just making sure you weren’t dead,” Arthur repeats. Standing on the threshold, Orm couldn’t really see what he was doing to necessitate fussing around the pans and drawers. “Anyway, the girl woke up even before you. She’s in the living room with Diana and mom discussing the situation.”

Orm allows himself only a moment of astonishment when Arthur turns around with another tray of food, and places it on the table close to Orm. He points at the particulars of the dish matter-of-factly. “It’s black pepper roast chicken. A kind of meat marinated with salt, garlic, pepper, paprika, lime, onions – did I miss something?” he muses as he holds out his fingers to count. “I don’t think so.” He pats the chair for him to sit.

Orm stares at his half-brother, wondering about the likelihood of poison. Maybe not deliberately – as he didn’t think there was any point in offing him that way at this point – but possibly by accident. He still found it difficult to reconcile his old impressions of his brother with the semi-responsible, not-quite-useless man in front of him now.

Then he notices the sweat-streaks on his temple and collar, and white dust on a few locks of hair, and soot marks on his clothing.

Noticing where his brother was glaring, Arthur pats himself self-consciously. “Hey, I was on the way to the shower when I overheard mom over the girl food. Considering I didn’t want the house accidentally set on fire, I volunteered to serve it.”

“When you’re so dirty?” Orm asks with a curl of his lip. Aren’t people handling food supposed to be clean. Upon inspection, Arthur’s hands _were_ clean, but still. “What have you been doing?”

And did Arthur expect him to do it as well?

“I was in town,” Arthur shoots back. “Dad’s been helping rebuilt places damaged by the tidal wave, and I’ve been lending a hand since I got here three days ago.” He points a critical finger. “That should’ve been part of your experience here – you break it, you mend it after all – but lucky for you, today marked the last of the renovations. You’ll be getting the grand tour without the commensurate hard work tomorrow instead.”

Orm frowns. “I still do not regret it.”

“I know you don’t. But I hope in time you decide it’s not the only way to help Atlantis. The means matter, little brother.”

“Don’t lecture me, Arthur,” Orm says coldly. “Find another way if you wish, but don’t take forever. Good intentions are no use when half the population is dead from starvation, and the other almost dead from plague.”

Arthur’s brows furrow, but he doesn’t stand down. “I know that.”

There’s a creak outside, and they both turn to find Atlanna coming in. She takes one look at them and knows something is amiss. A mother’s second sense neither waxed nor waned with time and disuse, it seemed.

“What’s the matter?”

Arthur had already recovered, face stretched into his usual carefree grin. “Nothing, just discussing food with Orm. I’ll go right up to shower now.”

“Yes, do so,” Atlanna allows, face scrunched up as he passes. He was gone in a few ground swallowing steps, leaving her to train her sharp eyes on her younger son alone. “Go on and eat then,” she tells him. “You need to keep up your strength. Did you sleep well?”

Orm sits and breathes deeply, trying to familiarize himself with the new dish. He was still startled at how vivid the smells were up here. “I overslept.”

Atlanna pours water into a glass and puts it beside his plate. “Don’t worry about it. The line between day and night is so much clearer here. Your body will get adjust to it in a few days.”

He pauses before the first bite. “And I do not appreciate being watched in my sleep.”

Atlanna arches an eyebrow as she leans on the edge of the table, folding her arms. “He was only checking in on you.”

He couldn’t answer immediately. The flavor had burst into his mouth, and he had to stop a pleased intake of breath from giving his approval away. He refuses to let anyone know there were things on land he could appreciate, and so far his brother had not served anything he disliked.

He chews slowly, then swallows. “All the same, I would like to be left alone in my room.”

Atlanna smiles fondly at him. “Of course.” She watches eat for a few more minutes, thoughtful. Orm doesn’t rush her. She would speak when she was ready, and always when she’d thought it clearly out. He didn’t realize he was bracing himself until he nearly couldn’t swallow from how tight his throat had gotten. That was when she decided to speak. “You know already that the girl is awake?”

He puts down the knife and fork to better focus. “Yes.”

“She accepted the situation as well as she could hope. Her memories are fragmented, but she does remember parts of it. She has consented to stay here when Diana returns to the city, to look further into the matter. As the sarcophagus was Pre-Fall, and we do not have many records left of those years, she might stumble upon something. I will lead the research on our side. I return to Atlantis at the soonest.”

“Why you?” Orm asks, displeased. “Why not Arthur? He is King. He should be there, being visible to his people.”

“Arthur is recuperating. It has been hard on him, staying for weeks when he had never stayed longer than three days underwater before. And he is tying loose ends here. He had disappeared without a trace, after all.”

He doesn’t quite agree still, but the statement had enough merit to dispel further argument.

“Orm, I am hoping you will help the girl, Kaia, while I am away.” She holds up a hand, staying Orm’s automatic protest. “We are working on finding out more about the woman and the sarcophagus, but even if we answer that, we have to consider that she cannot go back.”

“Why not?”

“You weren’t awake, but when we checked her wound this morning, it was gone. You had seen that wound last night. It should take a human weeks to recuperate, and an Atlantean at least days.”

“That is hardly conclusive.”

“But it is highly indicative. More changes might manifest in time, or disappear altogether. We are not sure. It’ll be a jarring enough experience for her without you making things difficult.”

“Not making things difficult and helping are two different things.”

“People panic when they don’t understand something. It’s unavoidable that she will ask questions. Answer them.”

“You mean tell her everything. I don’t agree. If she gets better, or even if she doesn’t, it is still the most likely scenario that she will want to leave. Nothing binds her here, unless you force her. And the more she knows when she leaves, the less safe we are.”

“Tom didn’t reveal our secret.”

Orm shakes his head. “You can’t expect every surface dweller to be like him. You were lucky with the first. It is foolish to hope for a consecutive second.”

“I’m asking not lightly, Orm. I know the risks. But this arrangement allows her to tell you more about the surface as well.”

“Arthur is supposed to tell me about the surface.”

“Arthur has not lived in large cities. He has kept from crowds his whole life, opting for the safety of a small community. He has limits.”  

Orm gives it the benefit of doubt. An information exchange _might_ not be such a terrible thing. But the knowledge of a prince who was once king is hardly commensurate to the knowledge of such a clever girl who might see no further beyond her books.

Atlanna senses the shift in his disposition. “And Arthur will benefit from it. He hasn’t had enough time to study our people yet.”

Orm scoffs. He knew it had been too good to be true. “So I am demoted to tutor.”

Atlanna’s gaze sharpens, and Orm feels the barbs of it burrow under his skin. “The king cannot remain so ignorant of his people’s history, as you must agree with,” she declares. “As prince of the realm, it is your duty to assist where he falls short. Unless _you’ve_ forgotten your lessons?”

“I forget nothing.”

“Then it’s settled.” Atlanna smile as she stands is victorious. “When you’re finished, find your brother and he’ll take you through the rest of the house. Then if you’re well enough, tomorrow the both of you can go to town.”

 

 

“You are saying that the sarcophagus belongs to Atlantis, which exists literally underwater, not as a ruin, but as a thriving, living kingdom with its own complex civilization, and that their royal family lives in this house.”

“Very concisely put,” Diana commends.

Kaia credits it to the human mind’s capacity to hold infinite impossibilities. After Diana sprung on her in one great Big Bang of a revelation a narrative that she hitherto thought existed only in Hollywood films, she was afraid her brain would just…not brain anymore. It was one thing to find out a mythical civilization exists, by _accident_ , but another else entirely to find it was real. And underwater. And that Stephen Shin wasn’t crazy after all, because she had just met the Aquaman. And–

“And the woman in the sarcophagus was real, and I might be possessed. Or cursed.” She pauses. “ _Which is the same thing._ ”

Diana’s brows furrowed. “I didn’t say that.”

“It’s precisely because you’re not saying it that I have to.”

“But you understand, until we investigate this further, we need you to stay here.”

Did she? Understand? It was all too fantastic, but because her mind doesn’t know what to make of it, she has to trust her body, and her body felt the reverberations of some terrible night. Her left torso was tender as a bruise, her hands trembled with the impression of jagged rocks, and every now and then her heart still stutters and her lungs heave, traumatized by some drowning episode she couldn’t remember. She wouldn’t believe they’d fished her out of the pier if not for those phantom sensations. If she could believe them in that, she could believe everything else in the meantime, for lack of any other available information.

Was no information better than wrong information? Kaia puts a hand on her temple and rubs. She needed time to think, but in the meantime, Diana was waiting for an answer.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Kaia watches Atlanna come back to the room and flash her a smile as she returned to her seat across. “Yeah.”

“It’s alright?”

“It’s not really a choice, is it? I mean, if you’d said an alien was going to burst out of my chest in a few hours, I wouldn’t be any more incredulous, though at least then I’d have more of an idea what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Atlanna comforts. “We’ll do our best for you.”

Not do anything? Kaia will really go mad then.

Not to give offence to their ability or their material, but basing on the fact that much of their narrative is broken and they were mostly relying on her to remember a huge chunk of events no one else could corroborate, they were all walking in the dark and she was holding the one working flashlight. And honestly, she was tempted to close her eyes. She knew enough campfire stories to know that a woman didn’t spend eternity in a coffin, refusing to pass on, without good reason – and those reasons might not fare well with the royal family. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she was persuaded. Why seal a woman in stone? It was a punishment imposed by kings and queens on the worst of their enemies.

The royal family of Atlantis was conveniently present, and it does nothing for her nerves.

But despite her misgivings, there was nothing else to do for now but sit and see how things play out. She was marooned in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by unfamiliar people, and her mind was fit to burst, all jumbled with new information and lost memory. Like grit on a lake, she couldn’t see anything until everything settled.

She sets herself to the menial, washing the salt from her skin and the sleep from her eyes (all the while avoiding looking too long in the mirror, because damn horror movies), and changing into another set of loose and oversized clothes (embarrassingly borrowed but still much appreciated), and familiarizing herself with the house and its inhabitants.

The lighthouse itself was blessedly comforting. Weathered and sturdy, like an old man of the sea. The wooden floor is faded from use, the walls hung with every manner of fishing implements and ethnic curios. As an academic, she appreciates the obvious pride at their ancestral roots; another malleable part of her conjured wild scenarios in which things do not go well and she’s skewered with a harpoon.

She hoped Atlanteans really were as advanced as Diana claimed they were, and they didn’t do such things.

The people were, if not as comforting as the setting, at least undeniably interesting. Diana introduced Atlanna foremost, as her friend and contact Arthur was out on voluntary work in town. Amnesty Bay had been devastated by the tidal wave, but in keeping with spirit of camaraderie more often found in small towns than in cities, the townspeople had risen in unity to help each other recover. Even more curious was the fact that the King of Atlantis– born and raised in their midst– was still willing to work with his hands.

Atlanna, the Queen Mother, couldn’t be further in looks from the beloved red-haired mermaid of her childhood, but she was nevertheless beautiful beyond human compare. Eyes the color of clear spring skies, and hair like spun silver. She has the softest smile, but her voice held a note of steel that made Kaia cautious.

Arthur, when he returned home, was unexpected. Tall and broad, he and his shadow easily swallowed a room, and yet the first thing to come out of his mouth was a fishman joke that made her laugh before she could decide if she was allowed to. He was like a puppy, Kaia decides, if a King could be described as one. One of those giant breeds apt to jump on their owners and steal food when no one’s looking – a little childish, but well-meaning.

Tom, the lighthouse keeper Arthur calls father, was like his house. Despite several sharp corners honed from bad storms and difficult years, he seemed sturdy and steadfast, an anchor filled with kind memories.

Barring Diana, there was one other person in the lighthouse, the one whose arms pulled her out of the water, whose eyes she remembers in the dark. She meets him only at the dinner table, the sun set in the horizon. Orm Marius had the straight-faced sternness of people who wore their armor to bed, the kind to whom first impressions count. She’d never want to meet him with her hair out of its pins or her feet bare, and yet that was how he’d first seen her. For the second time, at least, she was more or less presentable.

But the disadvantage then was that she can’t help but form her opinion of him in full view of everyone else. The table was meant to hold a bachelor and a friend or two (a reinforcement of the stereotype of lonesome lighthouse keepers), and even with another table added at the last minute to contain everyone, along with mismatched chairs from different parts of the house, it was quite snug. It was frightening to think anyone might hear her thoughts – how his profile could be on a Roman coin, his silhouette carved from the same models of the marble statues of a golden age.

_And anyhow, that’s just uncharacteristically poetic for you, don’t you think?_

She brushes the thoughts away like cobwebs, and thinks of something else, like how different he was from Arthur. But that wasn’t a good train of thoughts either. It was too private, and she of all people knew how sensitive family matters are, how terrible it is when people pry, even if they mean no ill, and worse still when they’re just curious.

Besides, they had not delved into her own family situation (or tragic lack thereof), so it was only fair to close her eyes to theirs.

“How do you find the food?” Tom asks.

“It’s wonderful, thank you.”

“Try to eat more if you can,” he says kindly. “You need it to recover.”

She nods and is certain she had a rejoining answer, but at that moment, her gaze had wandered back to Orm, and she’d forgotten it. Where Atlanna ate the food like someone who liked it and missed it for some time, Orm, even halfway through the meal, never stopped looking at his plate as if it might eat him instead.

They said he was there to learn about the surface, and she thought they weren’t lying. Everything was explained in detail to Orm, starting from the simple (how the food was made) to the complicated (where the food came from). At some point, global distribution was being discussed at the table, and Kaia can feel herself being convinced it wasn’t all an elaborate prank after all.

 As soon as the meal is finished, she helps gather the plates, and in the chaos of so many bodies in proximity, she had already ducked into the kitchen with a stack of dishes and pulling on the left glove to wash, when Arthur realized who had beat him to the counter. As recognition struck, his eyes widens like saucers, gives a cry of surprise, and near drops several glasses.

“You’re not supposed to do that!”

“Why not?” she asks levelly, pulling on the second glove. She’s too self-conscious to end the day without helping some way or another around the house. 

“You’re a guest,” he splutters as he comes up beside her.

“Exactly,” she agrees, reaching out to take the glasses off his hands. Big agitated guy, breakable things.

He recoils out of her reach. “ _No._ ” Atlanna sweeps in and he calls for the big guns. “Mom, she’s not supposed to wash the dishes.”

“So she isn’t,” Atlanna tells him serenely, before nodding at her. “I was just looking for you. Diana would like a word before she leaves.”

Kaia schools her expression of defeat and sighs instead, taking off the gloves and avoiding Arthur’s satisfied mood as she goes looking for Diana. She found the inscrutable conservator by the pier door, who upon seeing her, gestured for them to talk outside.

It was cold, nipping at Kaia’s skin despite the heavy knitted sweater, and she folds her arms against her chest in an attempt to conserve heat.

“I won’t go back to the city until tomorrow morning, but I won’t be going back here anymore. Clothes, research material – I’ll have them all coursed through Arthur,” Diana says, synthesizing once more the arrangements.

“Alright.”

Diana studies her intently. “You are sure? You do not need anything else?”

“Just answers, Diana.”

A nod. “I will keep in touch then.” A smile, and then, unexpectedly, she pulls Kaia into a warm hug that, despite being unused to such friendly overtures, made Kaia soften in her muddled reservations. “Take care, Kaia. Remember to call me for anything, even just to talk. I feel terribly for this.”

Kaia pats her back as people ought to (she thinks so at least; she has not done this often). “Don’t be. Let’s just focus on the future.”

Diana pulls back, smiling again. “I will see you soon.”

 


	5. In Cooperation

Orm keeps to the side of the stairs, which did not creak. When Atlanna said they were leaving, he had thought she would go immediately. But dinner had passed and only the Amazon left. So it mattered that he was not heard. His mother had extraordinary hearing, and Arthur and the girl were in the living room, each to a couch.

He only wanted water anyway, because the taste of smoke and ash from the grilled fish of dinner would not leave his mouth, even after the mint mouthwash Arthur gave him. It was reminiscent of fighting and he’d already been woken from one bloody dream.

In the kitchen, he gulps down cold water from the tap, and had refilled the pitcher in his room when he feels a sudden sense of unbalance. He staggers on solid ground and catches himself on the counter, water loud as a storm in his ears. As quickly as it came, it passed, and Orm pants in the sudden quiet.

When he straightens, all his senses were on alert. A resident of the house would not be so quiet, and his mind wanders through recent memory to where the knives were. A shadow flashes across the wall in the hallway before he could remember, so he moves quickly to the threshold, back on the wall to ambush the intruder.

He catches the faintest whiff of the sea flower smell from the washroom as he steps into the intruder’s path, maneuvering at the last minute to grab the girl’s arms instead of her neck.

Her face was blank as a sleepwalker’s, but unexpected strength meets his grip. He feels her stiffen like stone as awareness comes, and her feet shift to give better balance, pushing back at him. Then she stops herself, and looks up at him with the same gold-ringed eyes she had when he’d pulled her out of the water.

“Orm,” she acknowledges. Atlanna had been adamant that titles are not used. “Sorry for startling you, I was just going to get water.”

She includes her head and brushes past him, trailed by that faint scent. Artificial light floods the room when she takes a pitcher from the refrigerator, and fills a glass taken from the cabinet he’d left open. When she’d taken her fill, she makes for the door again, absently murmuring “good night” as she passes.

He follows her out the hall. She moved as if still in a dream, unfocused and floating over the floor. Orm tries to shake the edge off, not knowing what was going on with him. It could just be because she was a surface dweller, and he trusted her even less than Tom, who was spoken for by his mother. Maybe he was still half-asleep himself, or half-mad from being away from the sea for too long.

She turns toward the room he recognizes as the study, her head turning curiously in his direction briefly before she disappears inside. He follows, and finds her settling behind the desk, a mountain of books and papers around her.

He leans over the notes, and she lets him take them without protest. They had not told her about what he’d done weeks back. She was as trusting of him as a child.

He focuses on the papers, filled with her neat handwriting. There was a page about the Seven Kingdoms, another about the royal lineage, roughly tracing to Atlan, and countless others about the Great Fall, and a smattering of details about governance and customs. They were documents of everything she had gathered about them so far, with a few others that were strange to him. The palace columns weren’t made of coral anymore, having been replaced by marble some two hundred years ago. And the guards stopped wearing gold and green long before that.

He pauses over a page where she’d drawn a symbol over and over and interspersed every available with references to other civilizations. The insignia was still unrecognizable, but the longer he stared at it, the more he felt it should. She’d scribbled it on most of the other pages as well, doodled absently at the corner of that page, inside a drawing of a boat there.

There was a sheaf under her palm, and when he moves to take it, she shakes her head. “Not these. They’re just nonsense rambling.”

He frowns at being denied, but relents, leaning back to study her. “You should be sleeping.”

She shakes her head. “The water’s too loud.”

“Loud?” He looks past her toward the window, but the water was calm, though he could feel the electric shift in the air from rain in the distance.

“Like–” she looks for the words – “tide in the distance, or the underwater current when I was drowning. It’s not calming at all.” She bows her head back to her notes, picking up a pen, but when he doesn’t leave, his narrowed eyes fixed on top of her head, she looks back up, mouth turning down at the corners. “You don’t like me here.” She says it more as a statement than a question.

“I don’t know you,” he answers bluntly, not denying it.

“What do you want to know then?” she asks baldly. “Allow me to put your mind to rest.”

“It is not so simple as that.”

“I mean no harm to your people.”

He gives her an appraising look at the insightful deduction. “You dig for secrets of the past and present it to the world in a golden platter. I don’t contest that the sarcophagus you found might belong to us. There might really have been a living spirit inside. But I don’t trust that you won’t betray us. Atlantis must remain secret.”  

She looks up at him for a long time, holding his gaze. He could see understanding in them, but defiance as well.

“Don’t be afraid of these papers,” she tells him finally. “I’ll get rid of them, when this is over. Burn them with you as a witness if you wish. But not yet. I have to write them down so I can study what I know to try to solve the mystery of what happened. My mind is a bit muddled still, I can’t make sense of them just in my head.”

He could she wouldn’t relent. There was a kind of calmness about her that told him he couldn’t intimidate her into what he wanted. “Do as you wish.” Then, “And have a care for what you say, I will hold you to it.”

“I don’t think I’m sleeping tonight, I don’t want to keep you up.”  

Orm thinks of the bed upstairs, the outline of Arthur in the old mattress. He didn’t think he was going to be able to go back to sleep. “I’ll be alright.”

“Well then – do you read?” The question catches him off guard, and she clarifies. “It’s a bit difficult to work while being stared at. If you’ll stay, you may as well be occupied. Atlanna says you are here to learn anyway. Shall I recommend?”

His gaze moves to the bookshelf. Diana had run him through the classics that afternoon, in the brief interlude when she wasn’t attached to the girl. He remembers the title well enough, and picks it out the spine after a brief scan. He settles into an armchair, turning to the first pages.

“What is it?” the girl inquires. He brings the book up without stopping reading, so she can read _The Iliad_ on the cover. She brightens in satisfaction. “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν, ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή, ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε, Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. That’s a good one.”

“Your accent is atrocious,” he rejoins bluntly, looking up with an arch air.

She only laughs, taking no offense. “Yes, it is, despite Diana’s efforts.”

“You can’t be a very good translator then, if you can’t even speak Greek.”

“I can’t speak it, but I can read it, and that was enough to break the code that no one else could.”

“Code?”

“The sarcophagus was littered with no less than a dozen dead and living languages. My speaking ability leaves much to be desired, but I have a head for patterns that allow me to read a much wider range than the usual translator.”

He’d put down the book before he’d realized he was pursuing another line of through. “Is that why you chose this work?”

“No. That was something I discovered halfway through. The more appropriate reason is an idea I had as a kid that I never really let go of, silly as it is,” At his inquisitive gesture, she continues. “I guess it’s because some civilizations, they are caught off guard when they fall. Buried under volcano ash. Ravaged by sickness before help comes, or abandoned to it in the first place. They are forgotten. I don’t want them to be.”

She looks at him intently. “That’s why you shouldn’t fear me. I’m just a girl who can’t let go of the past, as they say. Your people are not past. You have not faded away. There is nothing for me to remember yet.”

Orm exhales. “You might have to before the end of your lifetime.”

It was spoken too low for her to hear perhaps, but sensing that it was not a good topic, she trails off anyway, though he could hear other questions snag on her throat. “I’ll leave you to your reading then.”

Orm returns to his book, but it takes him time to return to the narrative as he goes over her words. She had reminded him of the future he feared, of Atlantis crumbling away beneath the sea, silent and unmourned.

Frustration threatens to mount his chest again, his hands fisting with the need to do something. But the Trident of Atlan supersedes his claim, and he won’t have civil war to challenge it. He refused tear apart Atlantis between Arthur and him, not when it was weak enough. It needed all the strength it had, in _unity_. To act against the throne now would throw everything into further chaos.

He glances at her, but her head was bent studiously over her work, a furrow between her brows as she mulled over her work. It helps him calm down. As the night lengthened, broken only the sound of a page turning and the scratching of the girl’s pen on paper, he settles into the narrative, wrapped with the warm blanket sense of companionship between two people absorbed in their own turbulent thoughts.

By the time the soft blue and pink light of dawn passes through the window, Orm was turning the last page of the book, the dark thoughts of night far behind. He glances over the desk to find the girl gazing at him thoughtfully, pen suspended mid-word on top of paper. The light cast a halo around her head, and her expression was washed out, as if she’d been lost in thought for some time. His skin prickles, his face warm in unusual self-consciousness. Then he realizes she wasn’t really looking at him, only lost in thought.

It must have been hours since they had spoken. Mera had never been so quiet, or able to sit still long enough for him to finish two chapters before she’s reminding him of work he wished he could put off for an hour. And it was unnatural that he was finished before anyone. Back home, he was always last to leave the council room, or the records hall, always the one to work longest and hardest. As a child, it had been to prove that he was worthy of the throne, and as a man, there was simply too much requiring his immediate attention. He had forgotten what long careless sleep was like, or looking up and finding something still at his side.

Her eyes clear, and she blinks at him. “Have you finished your book?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was not unenjoyable,” he allows.

Her lips twitch, breaking the seriousness of her mood. “So you enjoyed it.”

“That is what I said, wasn’t it?” he says sternly.

“Just making sure,” she answers affably. “It’s one of my favorite books, and I judge nearly everyone I know by it. I was eight years old when my mother first read it to me, a chapter at a time. And every night before she turned out the lights, she’d ask me: what choice would you made, in Paris’ place?”

“And what did you answer?”

“Knowledge. Always,” she replies. “I wanted to be like my mother, because she was all-knowing to me then.”

“Not love?” he asks.

“No.” She was firm in her answer. “That choice led to tragedy. I thought Paris incredibly stupid taking another man’s wife, and Helen incredibly stupid for coming with him, all the dead in their wake be damned. I wished Hector didn’t die for them.”

She inhales deeply, and puts down her pen, stretching out her cramped fingers. “What would you have chosen?”

Orm had been thinking about it for some time. “Power, I think.”

“Not love?” she echoes.

“The most beautiful woman in the world tore Troy apart. All Helen’s love wouldn’t be worth it.”

He’s aware he’s being remarkably candid, but he’s buoyed by an otherworldly calm. And she was talking about a book, which was the one topic of amity he could bear with acquaintances. For a surface dweller, she was exceptionally unobjectionable.

“How do you judge by that answer, then?” he asks her, a little challengingly.

She pauses from her casual review of her notes, cocking her head. She says nothing for some time, while Orm can’t help but notice the shifting soft light, bathing the room in some otherworldly veil reserved for dawns. When she shifts, he wonders if he’d heard him at all, pondering instead, “I wonder if you would enjoy the sequel as much. The theme is quite different.”

Interest creeps into his voice before he could stop himself, “It is not finished?”

She grins, and stands, pulling out a book from the shelves. Then she turns back and offers it. He studies it dubiously. It was a smaller book, with a thin weathered cover. It looked nothing like the one he held.

He hesitates to accept willingly, the gesture bordering on offered friendship. She was tolerable, but he didn’t want to be friends with a surface dweller. Didn’t he?

“It’s a book, not my hand in marriage,” she says suddenly. His face snaps up to her face, which was screwed in amusement. “You don’t have to read it now.”

He takes it slowly, and a smile breaks out on her lips. He could swear the sun dawned on the room a second time, and he has to look away. “What a strange expression.”

“A friend– though he was not my friend then– used to use it on me. I had trouble accepting anything from anyone then. He thought it ridiculous. Some things are shared freely.”

She turns her back, hand on her mouth to mask her yawn.

“You should sleep,” he tells her, getting to his feet. He could hear footsteps on the stairs, the house’s inhabitant’s rising from their own beds. He wanted to avoid questions.

She hums noncommittally, arranging the sheaf papers into a neat pile. He makes for the door, and hears her belated murmur of ‘good morning, Your Highness,’ as he closes the door behind him.

He makes his way to his room, nodding absently at Tom as they pass each other on the stairs, thinking how he liked being called ‘Your Highness’ by a surface dweller, but he’d much prefer to have been called ‘King’.

 

 

The truck dips as Arthur gets into the driver’s seat. The space is almost too small for both of them, but there was obviously no other vehicle available for the day.

“So–” Arthur begins.

They pull out of the drive and into the highway with a lurch that makes Orm grit his teeth, wondering if Arthur was a terrible driver and if he could take over as necessary. The contraption can’t be that difficult to learn.

But the ride becomes smoother once Arthur settles into it, and Orm leans against the open windows, holding his hair back with a hand against his forehead as the rushing sea air buffets him. It was a lukewarm morning, signaling rain later in the day.

“You seem to be in a good mood for someone who didn’t sleep last night,” Arthur continues.

Orm gives warning hum. “Don’t ruin it.”

“Did she tell you anything interesting?” Arthur pursues.

“I was reading, Arthur, and she was working,” Orm says shortly. “Talking is not usually involved with either, though it might with you.”

Arthur keeps looking at him from the corner of his eye, but Orm refuses to acknowledge it. If they continued talking in this vein, they will end up arguing, and it was too early in the day for that.

Finally, Arthur’s attention turns away, and he fiddles with the dashboard. Music starts to play, and Arthur continues to press buttons until he finds a channel he likes. Orm lets the sound float over his head, while Arthur’s fingers tap the beats on the steering wheel.

They round a sharp bend, and the first houses appear on either side, perched on the slopes. Rising in the distance was the sprawling mass of the town going up unto the water where boats bobbed above the waves. Even from a distance, it seemed bustling with people.

Arthur turns down the music and begins pointing out buildings in an animated manner. It disconcerts Orm to hear his half-brother speak of population and livelihood and civic concerns with so much familiarity that he has to tell himself to focus on the information rather than recalculating what he knows of his brother.

“And there is the chapel where Fr Josef has retired, he was the only one of my teachers whose lessons I listened to because dad says he was damning everyone who even mentioned my missing mom in my hearing when I was growing up. I really should come by one of these days – remind me to pick something up to drop by his house on the way home. There’s a cemetery nearby too, so if you want to compare notes on burial customs he can give us a tour. He knows every dirty little secret this town has to offer for the past fifty years.”

Orm knows they’ve entered the main thoroughfare when people start squinting at them from the streets.

“Hey, Arthur, friend of yours?” one man with a sweater threatening to swallow his skinny form calls out, pausing from the crates he was unloading.

“It’s my little brother!” Arthur waves back.

Orm could spy the man’s incredulous expression from the rearview mirror. “Is that for everyone to know?”

“Mom’s return has already disturbed the town’s peace. I might as well announce you as quickly as possible, so people don’t have to come to the lighthouse with gifts twice.” He gives a flippant shrug. “Now that she’s back, people remember her fondly again.”

The truck suddenly stops, nearly unbalancing Orm. Arthur quickly jumps off, waving familiarly at the man who peers out the window, and coming inside the establishment. Orm narrows his eyes at the old sign announcing ‘The Blind Duck’, est 1895.

Just as quickly, Arthur comes back out and crosses to Orm’s side to open the door.

“Come on, Diana’s already checked out. We’ll try Darla’s shop to see if she’s there.”

Orm sighs and gets off, and notes that Arthur does nothing to lock the truck before walking off. Either the truck was of no value here or he trusted people not to take it. The more time he spends with Arthur, the more questions he has, and less answers to go with it.

He catches up to his half-brother, who had been waylaid by a woman with a baby who stares up at Orm with saucer-wide eyes as it sucked its thumb. Suddenly, he’s pulled by a hand over his shoulder and squashed against Arthur.

“That’s right, Mrs Shelby, this is Orm. He’s staying with us for the meantime.”

“Oh, how darling!” the woman gushes. “He has your mother’s hair and eyes. My Harry got my color as well.” She pats the baby carriage affectionately. The baby gurgles up in unintelligible response, reaching up covetous hands as if asking to be carried.

Arthur grins at him after waving the woman off on her way. Orm couldn’t step away quickly enough.

“Do that one more time and I’ll break your arm in ten places,” Orm promises.

“Yes, yes,” Arthur waves away. “Onwards then. We’re looking for the red-doored shop at the next corner.”

Orm gives a hard look at the next person to look at him curiously, and the next, and the next. They all look away quickly enough, but when Arthur opens a door to the sound of bells and pushes him back to allow a trio of young woman pass, his glower does nothing but elicit giggling behind their hands before they were even in courteous distance away.

“Come on,” Arthur insists as he steps inside and holds the door for him to follow. “If I leave you out in the street, I might come back out to a massacre.”

“Hey,” Diana calls, waving at them from the counter. “Give me a moment, I’m almost done.”

Orm browses the aisles with clinical efficiency, testing the cloth under his fingers for durability and material. Where Atlanteans favored sleek lines and form fitting suits, to facilitate movement underwater, warmth and comfort seemed to be an important factor here.

“What is it made of?” he asks his brother when he goes looking.

Arthur blinks at him. “Animals. Plants. Some are chemically processed. They’re mostly produced by automated factories these days,” he answers vaguely, already pulling him back out onto the street, where Diana was waiting with her purchases.

Arthur looks at them dubiously. “Did I miss something, or is your friend staying with us permanently?”

“I’m covering all bases,” Diana answers matter-of-factly. “Now where’s your truck? I’ll leave these there before picking up my printouts from Mikhail. He ran out of paper, so it took longer than expected.”

They come back up the previous way, and Orm tries to ignore all the stares so he can study the shops. Once the packages were placed in the truck – there were four, and Orm knows it’ll be a tight fit going back; definitely impossible if the Amazon was coming as well – Diana goes into the inn and Arthur looks up at the sky.

“It’s a good thing it’s cloudy, or I’d have to hide you under shade,” he comments.

“And I hope you planned the day better than this mess so far.”

Arthur looks back at him with a smile. “People are coming tonight for Tom’s birthday. Once Harold gets him out of the house, a few of mom’s old friends are coming over to set up, and as we’ll both just be underfoot, we’re not allowed back until the mid-afternoon.” He sweeps his arms around. “So. We’ll walk around, I’ll tell you about anything that interests you, and then we’ll have lunch. It’s a good plan, right?”

Orm’s left eye twitches.

Diana jogs back toward them, carrying a sheaf of paper thicker than the breadth of Orm’s arm. Arthur looks at it like it’s a carcass of a dead creature when Diana proffers it.

“It’s for Kaia,” Diana explains, pushing for him to take it. “It’s part of our research material.”

“It’s like ten of my thesis’ papers combined. Why do you people torture yourselves?”

“I don’t know how far Kaia’s memory goes back. They might help.”

Before Orm could stop him, Arthur had volunteered the information. “She worked all the way last night. Orm was there.”

Diana’s eyes sharpen like claws at him. “Last night? Was she alright? Did you discuss anything?”

“Her atrocious Greek accent,” he answers blandly, and anticipating the next question before Diana has uttered it, moves to kill the subject. “No, we did not talk about the woman.”

Diana backs off. “Alright, if you find out more, let me know.” She glances at her watch. “I guess I’ll leave you both here. Take care of her, Arthur. I like her.”

“As much as me?” Arthur teases.

“More than you,” Diana shoots back, and turns away from Arthur’s offended look to hold out her hand toward Orm. She shakes it once, firmly. “If you ever come to New York, you must let me know. I will show you all the best places – restaurants, museums, the monuments. Humans have made many terrible mistakes in the past, but that violence and greed also comes with passion and ingenuity in equal measure.”

Orm is calculating the odds of Arthur and his mother allowing him to go so far, assuming he even wanted to, when the Amazon pulls him closer, her voice low in his ear.

“They make enough war amongst themselves, prince of Atlantis. Do not add to the legion of widows and orphans left behind. There are other ways to protect the seas, and I will help you punish the wrongdoers if you promise to spare the rest.”

She steps back quickly, flashes a suspicious Arthur a quick smile before she’s off, a determined figure in the distance.

“She threatened you, didn’t she?” Arthur asks as they set off on the other direction. He had the air of someone who had been in the same position before. “Diana is nice, but she’s old, and she’s been through a lot. She gets scary sometimes, and she made me promise many times that you wouldn’t harm Kaia.”

“I won’t harm her if she does nothing to warrant it,” Orm tells him lowly. “Everything I do, I do only for Atlantis.”

“I know,” Arthur says. “That’s why I wanted you here.”

His brother had an odd look on his face, and Orm frowns. “What does that mean?”

But the expression had passed, and Arthur visibly draws on a serious face as he resumes his job of introducing the human world to Orm. It wasn’t that he was completely naïve. His education had been extensive, but there was only so much his tutors could tell him through words and pictures, and after his mother had been executed, those lessons had stopped altogether. All Orm is now familiar with relates to governance and war, the advances of their technology, the effectiveness of their weaponry.

More than once, Arthur suddenly disappears into a shop, voice as low as he was capable of while pointing out fruits and vegetables and different meats from the grocery, the smells vivid on Orm’s sensitive nose.

He continues to be animated as they sit in a small joint by the port, where the owner knew Arthur and came by only to ask if he wanted to try his wife’s new recipe. The man gives Orm a brief glance, prompting to Arthur to introduce him, and after a brief welcome, disappears back inside. Orm liked him best so far.

Arthur waves a hand toward the boats at harbor, explaining the main trade of the town, how every boat is distinctive to its owner, and passed down from parent to son.

“– and I had to explain to Mera that they are not communal property after she stole one in Italy! It got destroyed in the Trench too, so I couldn’t bring the boat back. I’m still guilty about it.” Arthur then catches how dark Orm’s expression suddenly is. “Hey. I’m sorry, that was too soon?”

Orm endeavors to keep calm. “It’s fine.”

But his brother tactfully veers the topic far away from the red-haired princess, and while Orm recovers himself as Arthur explains the education system by pointing at the school on a slope behind them, his attention was no longer quite in the matter.

He would never admit it, but her betrayal had cut worse than even Vulko’s. It was hard not to care when they’d grown up together, seen the same problems faced by Atlantis and promised to find a way to solve them. Of all people, he thought she would understand.

Food arrives, and if the owner felt the tension, he did not speak of it, taking no more time than necessary at their table.

Arthur looks uncertain, and Orm waves impatiently at their plates. “So what are these?”

“Vongole Pasta,” Arthur repeats. “Clams.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

He dutifully picks up the fork, watching Arthur twirl the slippery white noodles around his. The seagulls shriek their harsh cries above. The boats moan in their mooring, and the clouds rolling in are grayer than before.

“I never thought it would be easy, but it’s still harder than I expected,” Arthur confesses.

Orm knows he’s talking about the kingship. He’d felt both his mother and brother alluding to some less than desirable situation in Atlantis. His brother being on the surface so close to his coronation had been obvious enough.

“It’s not for everyone. People train their whole lives for it.” And even with all his training, Orm still wasn’t quite ready when he became king.

Arthur abandons the pasta and leans back. For the first time, Orm feels his exhaustion, seeping out from the boneless angle of his limbs, the shadows under his eyes. Orm can offer him no comfort. He had grown up with full knowledge of what he was inheriting – what he should have been his – the debates, the politicking, the endless game of it all. “If I have to sit through another council only to be told that each of my opinion is invalid because of some obscure law or precedent, I’m going to stab myself with the trident.”

“What did you expect, blind fealty?” Orm questions sharply. “Trident or no, the courtiers owe you nothing but the acknowledgment of your title. They won’t kill you in your sleep, but they won’t make it easy for you either.”

“I _know_ that I don’t know anything,” Arthur answers. “That’s why I’m asking for your help. Or trying to.”

“The whole point of this mess was our differences in opinion. And now you want mine?”

“I took the throne because I couldn’t let you destroy the surface. But as I told mother, if I continue blundering through this alone, _I_ might destroy Atlantis.” Arthur takes a deep breath, and tries to speak calmly. “I can’t rely on Vulko and Mera alone. I need you at my side, if only for this. Can’t we have peace?”

Orm hesitates against the instinct to refuse outright. He of all people knew how little Arthur knew about the people he suddenly meant to rule, a fact that once made obvious would be exploited by enterprising factions. King Nereus alone was capable of exerting tremendous pressure against an unbloodied king. No, he couldn’t let his brother rely on Vulko and Mera alone. His personal sentiments matter little in this.

“Alright, Arthur,” he says slowly. “We shall have peace over this.”

 


	6. Deep Breath

The house was in a whirl, and Kaia could smell something divine wafting from the kitchen. Her papers have been left in the study desk, the morning passed from one chore to another as the women who came to help Atlanna prepare for Tom’s birthday set up the tables and pushed aside furniture to make room for more guests.

She’s grateful for the distraction, because it didn’t allow her to think too much. She had done enough of that the previous night, and the effort had taken more of her strength than she initially felt. Unexpectedly, Orm’s presence had been calming, and there was a marked difference in her nerves from before and after he’d joined her. Though she was aware he didn’t trust her despite having saved her, she understood why and didn’t think too much of it. With a thousand years of isolation in exchange for survival, suspicion is the least of her expectations.

A thousand of isolation – how old was the woman in her head? How long had she been in the darkness, neither living nor dead, waiting? That was the feeling she couldn’t shake, like an inch under her skin, a rush in her blood – the feeling of having waited a long time for something that had finally come.

She jumps from as a hand grips her elbow. Jena, willowy and bubbly – and seven and a half months pregnant – smiles at her. “Time for lunch.”

Kaia returns the smile and puts down the washcloth. She had been dusting the surfaces for some time, well away from the gaggle of women in the kitchen. Such gathering always led to gossip, and Kaia had little story to share.

It was unavoidable now, and her stomach sinks as follows Jena’s waddling figure into the kitchen, immediately drawing attention.

“Kaia, right?” one of the older women, with curly salt-and-pepper hair and a baker’s apron, waving at her to take a plate. “Come eat. It way past noon and it’ll be chaos when everyone else arrives.”

There was a cake on the table, and Atlanna is smiling delightedly as she takes a dips her finger in leftover custard to taste it, surrounded by the others who coo when she expresses approval. A queen holding court, even here. Dishes were set on the counter like a feast – potato salad and mushroom soup and newly baked pastries, steam still rising from the oven, as well as a bowl that smells like gumbo beside a roasted chicken, and seafood everywhere.

Kaia takes a plate and the woman proceeds to fill it. She gapes at its contents, which the woman dismisses in advance. “Trust me, dear, you can finish it.”

There were five others in the room, including Atlanna. Five was a crowd in such a small space, and any minute now–

“Sit,” another orders, standing out of her chair. She taps the young woman beside her as well, to give way to the pregnant lady. “Atlanna’s been telling us of your wound.”

She was trapped, yes. It was her father’s parties all over again, when the aunts and grand-aunts and their friends managed to corner her no matter how she tried to be invisible against the wallpaper and potted ferns.

“Oh no, it’s fine,” Kaia says, but ends up sitting anyway upon their insistence. She subtly tries to push the chair a bit further back from the loose circle, in the hopes of being forgotten. She didn’t know what else Atlanna had told them. What was her story supposed to be? She hadn’t even known about the surprise until the women started arriving and she’d felt obligated to offer help.

“You’re an archaeologist?” the one who’d given up her seat asks her.

There was no help for it: they were all watching her with eagle-eyed attention npw. She had only delayed the inevitable. “Of a sort,” she answers. “I’ve worked on excavation, mostly as translator. I decipher old inscriptions.”

“So you’ve been to many places,” the young woman says with a longing tone. “That’s the kind of work I want.”

Kaia thought all young women wanted that, the freedom, the endless possibility of it. “It’s wonderful work, if you can abide the sweltering sun, the freezing nights, the occasional scorpion and spider in your blankets…and sand. Lots of sand. The sand gets everywhere.”

“It seems dangerous,” the woman who’d given up her seat comments, the word dangerous somehow gaining a capital D when she said it. Now that Kaia was looking, she thought she bore similarity to the young woman. The mother perhaps?

“That’s part of the adventure of it,” the young woman protests. “Discovering new cities, finding hidden tombs –”

Her mother looks disapproving, and Kaia finds herself agreeing for once. “Sometimes, the tombs are better left alone.”

She catches Atlanna’s eyes, then quickly averts her gaze back to her food.

“So where did you get the wound?” the young woman persists.

Atlanna shifts. “I’ve been telling them about how difficult it is to get hold of you,” she cuts in seamlessly to counter Kaia’s floundering. “You only ever go home when a doctor commands it.”

Kaia’s mind raced. “That’s not true, I come when I can.”

What was supposed to be their relationship anyway?

Kaia is glad when the conversation turns to easier ground – the places she’d been, the work she’d done – until finally, Atlanna shifts the conversation somewhere else.

There’s the rumble of a truck and the voices cut off as one. The women dash out, and Kaia heaves a sigh of relief as she’s left alone. Lethargy had crept in as she ate the savory meal and she was beginning to feel lightheaded.

In the living room, she could hear voices raised in greeting and excitement and Kaia shakes her head in mild amusement as she hears Atlanna’s thrill among them. The Queen of Atlantis had missed her friends on the surface. Twenty years, she couldn’t return…Kaia was certain it had been against her will, though it wasn’t possible to verify it. There were things kept from her, pieces of the story she wasn’t privy to, and she was careful not to pry. She was thankful enough they took her situation seriously, that they offered her hospitality…

A wave of dizziness suddenly passes through her, and she slumps against the counter. Images flashed too fast behind her eyes, the sound of the tide loud in her ears and salt heavy on her lungs. She doesn’t know long it lasts, but when she regains herself, _happy birthday_ was already being sung with gusto.

She pulls herself together and comes out to give her greetings to her host, only to find that she had missed the arrival of at least a dozen guests. The way was barred by too many strangers, and there was no reaching Tom.

The door bursts open, and Arthur roars his greetings, undeterred by a crowd who parts like the Red Sea before him. He holds aloft a box clearly hiding the birthday cake. Kaia looks for his brother, and upon meeting Orm’s gaze through the crowd, startles at the realization that she was standing on precarious tiptoe and quickly corrects herself.

Arthur puts the cake down on a table and a man produces a light. Another round of singing fills the room, punctuated by a loud cheer when Tom blows out the candles. Kaia hovers by the threshold, leaning by the frame as she wonders if it would be terribly rude of her to disappear into the study. A beat was starting to pound at the back of her head, her vision wavering with every loud bang and excited exclamation.

She finds her means of escape when she sees the cake in danger from Atlanna being twirled around by a giant of a man. She swoops in to save it in time, catching Atlanna’s attention.

“I’ll bring this out back,” she tells the silver-haired woman, who thanks her profusely.

With that, Kaia disappears into the back of the house, telling herself to take deep breaths and ignore the crash of waves growing louder with each second.

 

 

Kaia doesn’t notice a young man extricate himself from the crowd, moving quickly to follow her disappearing figure deeper into the hallway.

Orm is moved in distrust, but is caught by the sound of his name. His spine tenses, he whirls around in instinctive defense, when Atlanna calls him again, surrounded by curious-eyed women. Too many voices were whirling around Orm, but he could recognize introductions from his mother’s moving mouth.

Orm is used to celebrations of a scale to include thousands of guests, but he finds himself uncomfortable for the first time in a long while. Everyone here knew each other, and he knew nothing, and the disadvantage of it leaves him feeling uncertain. Orm could barely breathe from the warmth as it is; he was in no mood to entertain his mother’s old friends or their interested daughters. He excuses himself with a half-apology from the man who had sidled close to introduce himself, and sliced through the people toward the quieter hallway.

He strides, wary of being followed, and enters the kitchen with terrible energy.

The young man freezes. He had one hand braced against the counter, pressing into Kaia’s space. She herself stares at Orm, brows furrowed in consternation, arm pressed against the young man’s chest in remonstration, knife in hand poised in suspension.

Orm lifts his chin, shoulders straight as if his father’s hands pressed them down.

“Get out.”

The young man opens his mouth in protest but backs away tensely as Orm crosses the room like a dark cloud.

“Hey man, I was just keeping her company,” he reasons, backing away.

Orm presses his mouth tightly, hands curling into fists, until he feels a hand on his arm. He looks at Kaia angrily; she shakes her head. He takes a deep breath.

“Out,” Orm repeats, waving the young man away. “This is private space.”

Perhaps impertinence really ran in the young man’s blood, because he had the gall not to follow instructions the first time it was given. “I’m Marcus, by the way, I just arrived–”

“And you shall be sent off in short order if you do not leave _now_ ,” Orm cuts him off.

“Jeez,” the young man mutters, and Orm reins in his irritation at the slow, indolent way he makes his way out. “Wasn’t hitting on her or anything.”

The girl sighs and Orm realizes she was still holding on to his arm. She notices at the same time, and quickly lets go, turning her full attention to the cake.

“Is it common for women to be hit in the private rooms of their hosts’ house?” Orm demands.

“He meant hit on me, not hit me.” At his annoyed silence, she pauses to look up. “It’s another word for flirting.”

Mera would have had him pinned to the wall with the pins in her hair for the audacity. He supposed things were a little different in the surface. “He was manner-less and insolent. You ought to have called for someone as soon as he made his intentions known.”

“I didn’t really notice until he got up into my space,” she protests. “And then, I nearly sliced his face off in surprise.” She held up her knife.

Another flash of irritation runs through Orm. He could imagine the truth of her account: her distractedly letting the conversation flow over her, unaware until someone came too close.

“Why are you here?” she suddenly asks. “Did you need something? Water?”

“I saw a stranger wandering where he shouldn’t. Why are you here?”

“Dealing with this,” she waves at the cake. “And my head started to hurt with all the noise.”

“That’s your sleep deprivation.”

“That’s also my dislike of crowds.”

Orm catches the cake’s tower tipping over and thought nothing of it until Kaia tried to right it with the knife still in one hand, narrowly missing several fingers. He had her wrist in a steadying grip before he comprehended that he was moving.

She curses under her breath and the knife clangs against the bar as she tosses it lightly away. Orm lets her go, the cake suffering no true damage except for several mussed icing at the sides. The hand she pressed against her forehead leaves behind a line of icing. He swipes at it absently, then recoils when she looks up at him in surprise.

“Everyone okay?” Atlanna’s smooth voice flows into the room as she came in. “Kaia?”

She looks up with a rueful expression. “Sorry, I just needed space for a bit.”

Atlanna comes up right to her, tipping her chin up with a finger to get a closer look. “You don’t look very well. Why don’t you go and rest for now?”

“I don’t mean to be rude to your–”

“Nonsense, go and take a nap.” Even with a caring tone, Atlanna’s words carried command. “And I apologize for earlier, but they needed to get to know you themselves. Small towns are very wary of strangers.”

The girl nods understandingly, shoulders slumping. “Yes, that’s alright.” She chews at her lower lip. “I’ll have that nap, just a quick one.”

She goes off, and Atlanna pulls Orm back into the fray in the living room before he could make his own excuses to retire.

His mother take care of the details of his arrival like a queen holding court. He meets the baker, the grocer, several fishermen, and a mechanic. The last invites him to his garage after he expressed interest in mechanics, which had not been a lie. Orm wanted to see inside their vehicles, wanted to see how they worked and bring it back to Atlantis.

A girl called Madeline or Marilyn pushes a plate into his hands and refuses to disattach from his side thereafter. At one point, her mother joins in as well, and the younger girl seems to become increasingly familiar, touching his arm casually, leaning in as she laughs, and he wonders if his mother would construe it as assault if he accidentally elbowed her off the next time she attempted to drape over him again.

He’s rescued by Arthur, who intervenes like a large mountain and effectively distracts them while Orm finds an uncrowded spot. Arthur meets his eyes from afar and winks, leaving Orm with the feeling his brother had been watching for some time and had taken pity.

A game is begun on barely big enough space in the middle of the room, and Arthur asks him where the girl was. Orm explains, and Arthur expresses concern, wanting to go check on her. But he’s drawn away by yet another guests, and Orm sees the opportunity to get away.  

He doesn’t actually know where the girl had gone, but the study was the closest of his guesses. If he were wrong, it was still a good place to find temporary reprieve. Overexertion was beginning to creep up his limbs – the excursion had tired him more than it should.

The whimper catches him off-guard, and he closes the door behind him as soon as he steps in. The girl slumps back in the armchair he’d claimed the previous night. Her cheek was damp with tears, her teeth gritted behind her lips. The edge of the armrest moans, then cracks under her palms.

He shakes her gently, and she gasps awake. He steps back without a word as she struggles for breath, hand over her mouth. Orm wonders if he should call his mother. The girl was trembling, more tears streaming down her face. It was a violent thing, crying. Orm found he couldn’t abide by it any better than the first time he’d witnessed it.

He looks around, and finds the blanket folded on an end table where she must’ve left it the previous night. He shakes it sharply once, then bends to wrap it around her. He’s pulling back into respectable distance when she falls forward and rests her head on his shoulder, like a marionette cut from its strings.

A shiver races down his spine. Her hair smells of the ocean, and her warmth seeps through his shirt, not uncomfortable like the sun, but pleasant like heavy sheets in winter. But he couldn’t bring himself to pat her back as he’d seen others do for comfort, couldn’t move. After a few minutes – it seems much longer, but Orm had been counting in his head – she pulls back, wiping at her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she says, voice catching.

“We won’t speak of it,” he answers, already on his feet and making for the door.

She nods, as if in complete understanding, and takes a deep breath, the kind that fills your chest and reminds you you’re alive. “Was I gone long?” she asks.

“A while,” he says. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to return out there if you don’t wish it.”

Then he turns his back, conscious of the time that had passed and the suspicion that might come from his prolonged absence. And then he wonders what she had been dreaming of.

Half an hour later, she comes into the living room just with the sound of thunder rumbles in the distance. People pause in concern, and began thinking of home. Atlanna catches her immediately, fussing. She takes it with an absent look. Her face had been scrubbed clean, wan but not pallid, eyes distracted but not red-rimmed, but bearing no evidence of anything more than a faint dizzying spell.

“I hope your wife gets better,” a woman comments quietly beside him – Neena, the old woman with the many rings and heavy scent of fire, like smoke and ashes. “The sea will do her good.”

“She’s not–”

There’s a honk somewhere, and her attention drifts. “I’ll see you another time, dear. Do take care.”

She bustles away, Orm’s objection still heavy on his tongue, disappearing through the other guests and out the door beyond his reach.

Silver flickers through the room as lightning flashes outside the window, and Orm feels the answering rumble of thunder in his veins when it comes.

He unroots himself, pushing Hannah’s ridiculous comment away. It was a careless and inaccurate observation, that was all. He makes for the pier door and catches her look at him from across the room, face smooth as stone over the shoulder of a man Atlanna was introducing her too. The impertinent young man from earlier, Marcus, shuffles nearby, but treats her warily after a tentative glance at Orm.

His footsteps echo in the heavy air as he traverses the walkway to the sea, clothes snapping in the wind. Waves crash against the rocks, spraying his pants. It would rain within the hour.

His heart was pounding in his chest, like a child afraid of storms, and he clenches his fists to ground himself.

Nothing, he tells himself. It was nothing.

 


	7. Chess Game

It was well past midnight, and Kaia had neither slept a wink nor done any work. The desk was strewn with papers, but the page in front of her was blank except for a massive inkblot, the pen she’d broken still on top. The rest of the ink had dried on her hand, and in the dim light, it looks like a blood stain. The woman had not wanted her to write what she had seen in her dream. It was damning for her, and damning for Kaia, whose body she shared.

Her gaze flickers now and again to the empty armchair, wondering if Orm would come, because he kept her awake, then wishes he wouldn’t, because she was afraid he won’t miss the cracked armrest this time.

Her eyes flutter tiredly, and she takes a shuddering breathe, and stands. She tiptoes outside, careful not to wake the house as she makes for the kitchen. She rummages through the cabinets until she finds the coffee tin, then sets a kettle to boil. She hoped her hosts wouldn’t mind. She really couldn’t fall asleep. She was afraid she wouldn’t wake up – not as herself anyway. It was sheer luck that Diana had been there when she first woke up, and Orm the second time. She didn’t want to push for a third.

The house groans against the harsh wind and a flicker in the window catches her gaze before she could stop herself. The reflection was faint, her skin pale, her eyes bright, bright gold when it shouldn’t. Her vision wavers, the smell of the sea becomes overwhelming, until she shakes her head and exhales sharply to clear her head.

The woman held power over sleep, Kaia over the waking hours. But she was beginning to see that there was a third way, a middle way: a daydream, awake but not so entirely that she shuts out the woman and her memories.

She falls into the reverie with a slight gasp. Water rises around her ears like a stopper as the black and grey tint of the kitchen melted around her, replaced by a soft blue-green hue and flickers of gold. The woman in the mirror watches her intently, then a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth.

Suddenly, the kettle shrieks, and Kaia jumps out of her skin, scalding herself as she brushes against the heated metal. She switches it off quickly, heart racing. For the next few minutes, she waits with bated breath for footsteps in the hallway. When none came (and part of her wished someone would), she makes her coffee with shaking fingers. Coffee would keep the sleepiness at bay, let her keep control better.

She returns to the study quickly and keeps the door as closed as possible without sliding in the lock, hoping the deep aroma of coffee wouldn’t wake anyone. Then she sits back behind the desk, and sinks back into the woman’s memories, hoping dawn would come before she falls too far.

 

 

Sleep finds Orm as soon as he falls into bed and does not release him till morning. When he opens his eyes, the room was bathed in blue, rain pouring steadily outside his window, in stark contrast to the previous sunrise.

Breakfast was a subdued affair. Orm says nothing at the table, and with Kaia quiet at the other end, they were twin points of a vacuum while Arthur, Tom and Atlanna quietly recounted their affairs with the people from town.

Something had happened. It was hard to reconcile the girl at dawn yesterday with the one today. Kaia was stone faced, pale skin drawn too tight over sharp bones. The shadows were dark under her eyes. She hadn’t slept again.

Atlanna did not miss the change, and he found her whispering to Arthur after the meal is finished. The girl drifts past Orm and he almost reaches out, when a truck honks outside. His mother and half-brother drift away to say goodbye to Tom, whose bags were packed and waiting by the front door. Orm stays the pier door, scanning the restless sea. The rumbling of thunder was like fire in his veins.

“I will see you in a few days,” Atlanna says at his side. She had changed into a silver suit, a shade close to the stormy sky, invisible in the water. Then she too was off, walking down the pier and jumping into the water. A contingent of guards were likely waiting to escort her home, and Orm feels a pang of envy. He, too, missed the sea.

“Come up with me to the lighthouse,” Arthur calls out behind him. “I have to open the light.”

Orm turns and studies his brother. After their talk the previous day, something had shifted. Arthur moved with a lighter energy, his smiles trained more often toward Orm. For his own part, Orm knows it would take a long time before they found equilibrium, and avoiding him prolong the process.

“Fine.”

“Wait here.”

Arthur disappears into the back, and Orm continues his survey of the sea. He can’t pinpoint the source of his unease. A storm was only a storm, but not this one, it seemed.

The girl floats like a shadow behind Arthur, book under her arm, when he comes back with a basket in hand.

He leads them up, up an endless flight of stairs, and as they steadily came higher, the whistling of the air became louder, like a boiling kettle. A particular sharp crack of thunder echoes inside the tower, almost drowning the sound of clanking metal. Arthur whirls around in concern, and Orm looks over his shoulder.

“I’m fine,” the girl says, a hand held up to stop Arthur from coming further down to fetch her. She was on her knees between two steps, struggling to right herself.

Orm ignores the warning and grabs her outstretched wrist, pulling her back to her feet. She stumbles against him, unbalanced, and looks horrified. He shifts until the wall is on her back, and she slumps against it when he releases her and steps down so she’s between Arthur and him.

She shouldn’t be there. He would have her sleep downstairs, but they both knew they can’t leave her alone. He could see they were close to the top anyway.

 “Go,” he commands, when she looks ready to protest. “If you fall, your friend will have our heads.”

The mention of Diana silences any protest and she turns away without another word, keeping a hand on the wall as she tests the next step. Arthur briefly casts a curious look at him, then moves onward.

It was the thunder that she keeps flinching from, and every time it comes, she jumps so badly he thinks she might slip and fall again.

But they reach the final step without further incident, and they enter a room encompassing two floors. The first level was solid wall, against which boxed supplies were set. The lamp and lens are raised in a platform in the middle of the room up to the second level, which was lined with glass storm panels and reached by another short flight of steps.

Arthur leaves the basket by the steps and comes up to switch on the light. Orm follows closely, watching how the mechanism worked. With a switch, the light flares to light, too bright to stare at, and Orm blinks back stars in his vision as he looks away.

The bay is spread out around them, small and hunched under large rolling clouds. The rain fell straight down, the glass rattled from gusts of wind, and below them the sea undulated.

By the steps, the girl had set out the food and thermos, and was pulling out a checkered box.

Arthur bounds past Orm. “Do you play chess?”

“A little,” she answers, watching as Arthur proceeded to set up the board.

“We’ll play after.” He looks up Orm with obvious intention. “In the meantime, there’s a version of it that I saw in Atlantis some weeks back that I’ve been wanting to learn about.”

“Are you any good?” Orm inquires.

“I’m not _bad_.” Before Orm could comment, he holds up a hand. “It’s just a friendly game, we’re not betting future kids or anything.”

Orm smiles sharply. “I’ll take the black.”

“Like your soul.”

Orm scoffs but makes no further comment as Arthur moves knight forward.

The girl watches quietly as the game opens, the first few moves light and easy as Orm gauges his half-brother’s ability. It wouldn’t be very fun if the game ended too quickly. But Arthur was, surprisingly, not a novice, and the game stretches on.

The girl hums beside him as he takes Arthur’s second bishop, but makes no comment when he looks at her. Her eyes were fixed completely on the board, darting here and there as if playing a game of her own.

They’re on the last few pieces when an insistent ringing in Arthur’s pocket breaks their concentration. He pulls out the Atlantean device with a frown, brows knitting as he answers.

“Dad?”

He gets to his feet, walking away until the sound is drowned out by the weather.

Orm studies the board for a few more moments, then leans back. “This game is finished,” he pronounces. Checkmate was guaranteed in the next two moves.

“Not really,” the girl disagrees.

Orm arches an eyebrow and waves an unbothered hand over the board. Her eyebrows furrow, and raps a fallen bishop against the floor in a restless _tap tap tap_ sound.

Finally, she pulls the white queen away from the king, out of the loose protective wall Arthur had put them behind using his last pieces. Orm’s brows furrow, and he counters the move by taking his rook out of harm’s way.

 

 

Arthur closes the call with rattled energy from and turns back to look at his two wards. Orm is still as a statue, and Arthur’s stunned to look over their shoulders to find his queen cornering Orm’s king – a single white piece surrounded by black.

 _Checkmate_.

 


	8. Lightning

“That calls for a rematch,” Arthur quips.

Orm gives his brother a long look, hearing the slight catch in his voice. But if Arthur was hiding anything, it was not plain on his face as it should be.

“You guys go ahead and play, I’m going to go check on something for my dad and see about lunch,” he excuses himself.

Orm watches him leave with suspicion, wondering if it had something to do with the call. The lines of his shoulder were tense, and he had gone quickly.

“It was probably just luck,” the girl says quietly as she starts putting away the pieces.

Orm didn’t believe in luck in a game like this. His distrust moves toward her, taking note of how she hadn’t raised her head once, her face hidden.

“Who thought you to play?” he demands.

She jumps at his tone, shoulders straightening, jaw working. “My mother,” she says cuttingly.

How little he really knew about her, save her work. “Doesn’t she worry about you?”

“She’s dead.” Her voice was sharp as knives and poisonous. “If she were here, I’d be with her instead. She’d solve this much faster than I can.”

“And the rest of your family?”

“None of your business.”

Orm stiffens, unused to such a tone. Of all the things, that reaction makes her look at him – gold eyes again, why do her eyes change color? Then she winces, and turns away, getting to her feet to stare out the windows at the furthest part of the room, arms around herself.

Orm purses his mouth into a thin line, beating the sharp words at his throat to submission, and lets the distance calm him down. He’d touched an obviously sensitive topic – so family was a sensitive topic above and below sea. And he was stung by defeat, she short-tempered by lack of sleep.

He grabs the book she’d left behind, and frowns to find it full of poetry. Hadn’t she been working? Words dart out in parts as he flips through the pages, mind racing. If she hadn’t been working, why hadn’t she slept? Fear of another nightmare?

What _had_ she dreamed when he found her crying – teeth clenched, hands fisted, _furious_ , not grieving, as his mother’s tears had been?

He reads quickly through the passages, allowing himself to be soothed by the gentle rhythm of evoked summer and life, pushing the harsh storm outside out of his head. It was a light-hearted book, and very far from this reality, filled with sun and wildflowers and other things that Orm had never seen but now wanted to.

A hum goes through him, like electricity in the air, and he’s suddenly back in the lighthouse. Instinctively, he looks toward the girl, hand outstretched toward the glass. He watches her step closer and closer, until her breath fogged against it.

He stands and moves behind her to look over her shoulder. She had likewise calmed down, and turns slightly to accommodate him. It was difficult to see anything in the sheet of rain beyond the glass, but if he squinted he could see the raging sea. His eyes dart here and there, looking for what had caught her attention, until finally she taps her nail in the glass and he feels another jolt of electricity thrum.

He leans closer until he could see the small black thing hovering beyond.

“That’s a drone,” she tells him lowly. “It’s a remote surveillance device.”

“I see.”

She makes the smallest jerk of her chin toward a spec of black in the distance. “Is it a fishing boat? Can you see?”

“It’s too far.”

“It needs to get out of the water. The storm’s getting worse.”

Both of them glance at the door, but the tell-tale sound of Arthur coming up and down the stairs remained absent. He tries to remember how long it has been since he went down.

“I’m going to go find Arthur,” Orm decides. “No, not you.”

“Let me come down, it’s too loud in here.” She jerks her chin stubbornly up, but at their proximity, she came only to his chin, and wasn’t very threatening.

“You’ll fall and break your neck.”

But she was already on the way to the stairs, leaving him to follow while mentally cursing the obstinacy of women.

Orm outpaces her at the landing and takes the lead, just so she doesn’t actually pitch forward to her death. At the ground level, he immediately senses something amiss, even as the girl peers through the rooms. It was dreadfully quiet, a thing unheard of with Arthur.

“He’s not here,” he calls out, seeing her flit ahead in the living room.

She’s looking at the front door in confusion when he arrives at the threshold. The pier door was partially open, and through the gap, he could see two figures clambering up the rocks in the far edge of the outcropping.

In a flash, he crosses the room and pushes her down the opposite hallway.

“Quiet,” he hisses at her startled protest.

He presses her against the wall, away from sight, while he glances around the wall. After several moments, the men stumble into the room, sleek black wetsuits gleaming, their backs heavy with breathing apparatus, weapons strapped to their waist.

One of them removes their helmet and calls out, “Hello?”

Orm wants to know how they went past Arthur’s guards.

The other had removed his helmet as well. “Maybe they’re up top,” he says. “They won’t mind, I think. We’ll explain to the keeper if he shows up.”

Stuttered radio transmission breaks through the downpour, followed by a curse. “No signal,” one hisses.

“I knew we shouldn’t have gone through,” the other answers. “That Stephen Shin is nuts. Yeah, we got a weird-looking body, doesn’t mean we were going to find a pod of fucking mermaids in the water. And the commander’s no better after –”

“Shut up!” the other growls as a voice comes through the radio, asking for status in broken connection.

The girl had gripped his arm at the mention of Stephen Shin, and she leans in now urgently. “You can’t be found. You have tell Arthur none of you can be found.”

“We won’t be.”

Her voice is tinged with alarm. “You don’t understand, Stephen is one of the few people in the world who believes in Atlantis, and if he has the military with him, he has the equipment to sweep the bay’s entire seafloor looking for you.”

“How do you know this?” he whispers back.

“Everyone knows Stephen! He’s been trying to tell everyone that Arthur is Atlantean, that the tidal wave was made by Atlantis –”

Orm stiffens, snatching his eyes from the intruders, and in the split second where their eyes meet, she understands.

“It was Atlantis?” she breathes in horror.

“It was me,” he replies.

Her face goes three shades of white and an unhealthy hue of gray, but Orm forces himself to consider the more immediate plight, weighing their options. He could fight – there were only two men, it would be easy. But it would expose them needlessly.

The two divers move down the hall, chasing a signal. Orm pulls Kaia toward the front door and into a crouch against the wall outside. The highway winded close to the sloping hills for a long way on both directions, disappearing briefly here and there on sharp curves. There was no cover along the whole stretch, and they would be seen from far away, despite the rain soaking them. The forest covering the slope might provide cover, but Orm was unfamiliar with it, and didn’t know where it led. He’s left only with the option of the water. Whatever happened to the Atlantean guards, Orm should be able to swim quickly into another area until the intruders leave the lighthouse.

“Back to the water, on the other side,” he instructs. “Head down.”

The earth had turned soggy with the long downpour, and Orm is reminded of his abhorrence of the surface when the mud squelches under him, staining his clothes and feeling disgusting under his hands. The wind was gale-like, and the girl bows her head against it while he scowls at the indignity of the situation.

They reach the rocks shortly, and a glance at a window shows no sign of the men inside.

“What now?” she asks him. Her cheek was smeared a little where she’d tried to push her hair back from her eyes, and he resists the urge to brush it off.

He considers waiting them out, when he spies a dark figure suddenly breaking through the rain shower and landing heavily on the pier. The armor is distinctively modified, painted black and streamlined, but Orm would recognize the prototypic armor design anywhere. He had contributed heavily on the project, and nothing happened without his approval.

Of the first set approved for testing, he had taken only one, given to a mercenary surface dweller with a grudge against his half-brother.

“Down, slowly,” he tells her.

She had seen the man, and makes no further protest, though he could see it bitten on her tongue. Sea spray buffets them, and the rocks were slippery underhand. He keeps his attention alternately on the girl and their surroundings, until he feels the water lap against his feet.

She hesitates, looking with fear at the water, and he grasps her wrist. “I’ll pull you after me. Just hold your breath for–”

He catches the sudden alarm flash on her face just as he feels the iron grip on his ankle. It pulls him down with incredible force, and he’s dragged into the water against her horrified cry.

 


	9. Maelstrom

Orm knows it’s the Brine in the split second before the waves crash over him and he’s dragged by the feet away from the lighthouse. His lungs heave, shocked at the sudden shift from air to water. It takes his body some time to remember what to do, but when it does, it’s automatic. His body twists sharply, his hand grasps the smooth endoskeleton of a sentient crustacean. With a sharp spin, he hauls the much larger opponent off his shoulder in a way that would’ve been much more difficult without the water around them, before kicking powerfully back where they came. The soldier collapses in the crash against the rocks, shell caving in with the imprint of the sharp angles of his body.

His eyes sharpen against the swirling current in the brief moment he’s released. The rocks go steeply down from the outcropping of land where the lighthouse stood. In the murky shadow, shapes creep out of little caves in the rocks and up toward him: Brine soldiers camouflaged against the cliff face.

One of them had already been lying in wait by his feet–it breaks away from the rock, leaping for him. His sides erupt in fire as its pincers encircle him in a deadly embrace, it’s weight pulling him down toward to the others. Just as he finds purchase and heaves, separating head from body with a sickening crack, another solider manages to hook into the fabric of his leg–and part of his leg–and yank him down deeper.

Light flickers faintly above him; he was steadily sinking. A heavy weight climbs unto his shoulders and wraps a thick arm around his neck with a large claw, glancing his cheek as it went. His ankle twists violently where it’s still held when he breaks the arm off of his new captor and uses the sharp end to pierce the narrow space between his neck plates.

Another simply takes its place, and another still latches on his back, and with every kill, he’s dragged deeper and further away from the lighthouse. He’s lost count of how many were left – he couldn’t see past whoever held him tight.

Bone shatters on his right shoulder and white light bursts behind his eyes. For a moment, the world falls away, black and blank, and he’s ten again, battered in his father’s rigorous training routines, where all the privileges of his royal blood were stripped away in the face of his weapons master.

_Get up!_

Sound rushes back all at once, rushing water, sliding shell, breaking stone, and a thousand buzzing murmurs at the back of his head. He drives a knee up and crushes the soldier in front of him against the rock once, twice–his head is pulled sharply back–something snaps in his resistance, and he doesn’t know what it was he had broken this time.

He struggles, but his limbs were beginning to feel leaden, locking in place. Another voice at the back of his head screams betrayal, recognizing the anesthetic, almost paralytic, effects of Fishermen-made medicine used as poison.

Then weightlessness.

He feels his feet brush against sand of the sea bottom as he whirls around.

Black hair floats around the struggling Brine soldier like moving shadows before a pale arm jerks and breaks its neck. It crumples heavily into the sand floor and in the dark, the gold rings of her eyes were bright.

Briefly his mind supplies a name, but it’s quickly discarded. That was a human girl, fragile, sleep-deprived.

He blinks and then she’s right in front of him. She raises her hand, and he realizes belatedly it was not in threat when he already had her wrist in instinctive defense.

Lights pierces the darkness and they collide briefly when he makes to move in front of her and she moves in front of him. The small jolt is enough to send an inferno of heat on his damaged shoulder, and the briefest delay allows her to position herself defensively in front of him.

“Get away,” he hisses, and even his throat fights him for that effort. All of him wants to lie down and sink into darkness.

“No.”

He couldn’t immediately see past the glare, but he could still feel and hear the water around him, could discern the click of a weapon right before the shot is fired. He recognizes the flare of the prototypic Atlantean gun rushing through the water a beat faster than the other shots, and shoves the girl off its path, when the water pulses powerfully. The force is synonymous to a violent explosion, only without fire. It pushes back everything like a physical wall, and the lights spin out of control as the divers careen back.

Only the black armored man manages not to be thrown back. A pair of red-hot shots fire back, and the girl grabs his arms, spins them around, and again the water pulses. This time, he sees the gold in her eyes pulse with it, like living fire inside her, and the aftermath is not calm, but an intense roiling undercurrent that he’s only encountered once before, during a storm in the Pacific.

“Prince of Atlantis,” she says, and it was an ancient sound, holding him to life like a hand around his heart. Behind her, the water thrashed and whirled, but the two of them were untouched. “Why did you send the tidal wave?”

He fights against her terrible hold, against the poison, against the memory of his anger.

“Orm,” she persists, and it was her own voice, half-terrified, pleading, pressing against his muddled thoughts. “Why did you do it?”

“I was trying to save my people.”

She slumps forward with a whimper, and Orm feels the pressure on his chest disappear. Darkness crept at the edge of his vision, and the world slowly fell away with the sound of a girl screaming in anguish.

 

 

Tom had called as soon as he thought themselves far away enough for anyone listening in to be far behind. They had passed the military contingent in town, then at the outskirts, visible in a secluded pocket of the bay.

It’s a risk leaving his two charges alone in the lighthouse, but Tom had heard Atlantis mentioned as they passed the town, and his friend Harold had confirmed it when he called home. Arthur made the decision to trust his brother. By the time he arrives, a convoy was filing swiftly into the highway. He’d been tracking it since, following it well out of town until the last bend finally leaves Amnesty Bay out of sight.

Arthur leaps from the water from behind the convoy and unto the top of the second moving truck. For a moment, he skids on the wet metal and nearly slides all the way off before he catches himself on a bar. He checks the driver’s side for discovery. On a clear day, he would definitely have been seen and caused immediate alarm, but under this storm, he was hidden well.

He punches through the roof twice, because it was a heavily armored after all, and drops straight down with his feet on either side of an operating table. The dead gaze of an Atlantean guard stares up at him, momentarily jarring him before the click of weapons alerts him to a pair of soldiers. He catches the barrel of one gun–it open fires on the other soldier–and he uses it to smash the man’s head back, sending him falling down beside a cowering white-coated scientist.

“Sorry,” Arthur apologizes quickly before knocking him out as well.

By this time, the driver and the soldier in the passenger seat had become aware of him. He had barely torn through the side of the truck when shots ricochet inside the compartment. He darts forward and launches a right hook through the narrow opening from which a gun was poised.

The truck swerves sharply, the driver now alarmed. Deciding it was more dangerous to have a dead driver, Arthur turns back to the dead Atlantean, briefly noting the grass stains on his face, his armor partly dismantled to reveal pallid skin, not quite like human flesh. It seems they had trouble working it off, and Arthur is a bit smug. The war designers had gifted him with an honorary suit, and it took him fifteen minutes just to the strap the breastplates on.

The truck lists madly again, and Arthur hauls the guard up and throws him out into the raging sea, where a team was waiting to take the evidence away. He quickly swings out after it, hanging out the side of the truck, where he exchanges a look with the soldier on the passenger seat of the truck ahead, and finds beyond that a tank-like vehicle whose nose was slowly being brought around to his direction.

Electricity prickles his skin, and he glances up in concern at the sea, afraid lightning would strike anytime. But he couldn’t leave yet, not without knowing where the other missing guard is.

With a long-suffering groan, he leaps to the other truck amidst gunfire, and manages to burst in through another hole just as a missile whizzes past overhead and explodes with a deep reverberating boom! Inside the compartment, he finds an empty table, and he curses as an unlucky single soldier who whispers, “Aquaman!” in alarm before he’s hit unconscious.

There were no other trucks that could hide a body, and Arthur tears through the side of the vehicle and straight out. In the brief time he’s suspended in the air, he finds that the water was rippling unnaturally, round and round against the usual wild abandon of the waves. He had never seen a whirlpool in Amnesty Bay, but he’d caught one developing in the Bermuda Triangle during one of his childhood fieldtrips with Vulko.

In the water, he finds his guards struggling against the undercurrent, pushing them further and further out from the Eye, and he wracks his brain as to this one’s origin. The storm had been unexpected enough, though not suspicious on its own. This was… something else entirely. It was like a wall that wouldn’t let anyone pass. It spins and spins with a violence and anger, and as the center tightened, the edges lash out.

It couldn’t last. He lets his body relax and looks around to tell his guards not to fight it. It was then that a hard-shelled body slams against his side. It was too fast, quickly lost in the foaming water, but he could’ve sworn it was one of those large Brine crab soldiers he’d encountered before.

The whirlpool stretches through the minutes long enough for an inkling of doubt to worn its way to Arthur’s conviction until it finally ceases, and the water stopped being violent in the way of strange whirlpools and became a little less violent in the way of natural storms.

As soon as the water calms down, he zooms through the water to shake his guards alert and send them on their way.  

His comm rings urgently just as he sees them off.

“Arthur!” his mother cries. “What is happening there?”

“I’m not sure yet,” he answers honestly. “I managed to get one of the missing guards, the military was trying to take his body inland. I have to check that they don’t have the other one as well.”

“There are reports of an underwater disturbance.”

“It was a whirlpool, straight out of nowhere. I’m working on that too.”

“I’ll send more guards–”

“No,” Arthur objects. “No, there are divers around, and after this incident, the place will be crawling with uniforms. I’ll find out as much as I can, make sure dad’s safe, then I’ll call you back.” His mother’s silence is clearly unhappy, and he adds, “I saw a Brine soldier earlier. Can you please check on that?”

“Of course,” his mother says. “Where’s Tom?”

“Out of town. He’s safe.”

“Good, good,” then, “Wait, where are you? Your brother, where is–”

“I’m about to check on him now.”

Arthur feels guilty cutting his mother off, but time was of the essence. There was so much he had to do, and he couldn’t send someone else to do it, not when things were so currently so critical.

He swims quickly toward the lighthouse, and is concerned to find more Brine soldiers, dead, some of them thrown so hard against the rock face that they had become embedded into the stone. Alarm climbing, he rushes unto land, barging into the house uncaring if there were soldiers.

He is greeted by quiet in every room, the house creaking all around him as if in protest of some terrible thing it had seen. Wet puddles precede him, human footsteps. Several people had come in and tracked in the water.

He runs up the lighthouse, but even before he reached the zenith, he knew he would not find his half-brother.

He couldn’t find the girl either.

“Diana’s going to kill me,” he mutters. “Shit, mom’s going to kill me.”

If Orm had tried to escape, she should be around, unconscious or otherwise, but there’s no trace at all of a struggle anywhere.

He turns around in a circle in frustration, gazing past the glass panes toward the gray sky and the gray sea, running a hand through his knotted hair. He draws up the underwater map of Amnesty Bay in his head, memorized from years of exploring its corners, and thinks of the whirlpool, the diameter of its force, and anywhere those caught in its orbit might’ve washed up in. Arthur knows Orm wouldn’t go inland. He would go to the sea, and he would’ve been caught up in the eddy. He plots possible points in his head.

Afterwards, he calls the captain of the guards to collect the Brine soldiers by the lighthouse before anyone else finds them, and to comb the nearby shores–very, very discreetly–for any stray bodies. Afterwards, Arthur goes out into the gangway and jumps into the sea. He makes quick work visiting every cove, every inlet and cave underwater, until at last, he fears that his brother was gone for good, and that meant he had lost all trace of the girl too.

He kicks at the sand, cursing as he looks up at the cliffs, when an idea, remote and desperate, comes to him. Without any other leads, he follows it, diving deep underwater, down to the sand floor, until he finds the place where the rock face stops just above his head, not touching the seafloor.

He goes in, walking some ways before the rocks ceiling ends and light filters through the water. He swims up, quietly, and pops his head off the water to peer into the small hidden island inside the cave. In the open dome above, the storm was beginning to abate, and a few stray rays of sunlight pierce the clouds. It cast a faint light on the girl, still half bent over his brother in troubled contemplation.

He had made no sound, but her head suddenly jerks up and all the softness of her face gives way to stone and strength, not a girl but a statue, holding his gaze unblinkingly without her usual demure as she slowly rises to her feet.

He doesn’t know what it was that unsettles him until it dawns on him that her eyes were as gold as his. He’s unsure there is recognition in them. With her back against the light, her shadow grew longer and taller than she is, and in her clenched hand, there is the silhouette of a trident.

“Kaia?” he asks uncertainly. Fear skulks in the quickening pulse of his blood. Diana had not mentioned anything like this, and his brother’s stillness concerned him.

Her head cocks almost imperceptibly. While his face was unfamiliar to her, her name seemed to strike a chord of remembrance.

After a long eerie silence, she acknowledges, “Arthur,” and her body was no longer tensed to attack, and the sound of her voice is all hers.

He inhales in relief almost, when she crumples, as if she had been held up only by some mistrust that was now dispelled.

 


	10. Move Out

Kaia feels the impact only as an afterthought. Part of her was startled that the woman had retreated so easily upon her request, perhaps satisfied now that the immediate danger had passed, or simple assured of the bond Kaia had ratified to save Orm. Afterwards, another part became aware of the implications of that bond, with the woman compliant at the back of her mind but Kaia’s senses still heightened beyond what should be possible.

The beat of her heart, the undisturbed drip of minerals on the damp walls, the flutter of bats wings in the crevices of the save. Each tiny grain of sand against her skin, the pinpricks of heat where her still healing assortment of battle wounds rubbed wrong, the confining slickness of her torn clothes against her body. Copper on her tongue, and salt on her throat.

But darkness behind her closed eyes is like the darkness of the tomb, where she lay helpless and awake for so long, so she opens her eyes to see the myriad of colors dancing in a cave pierced with little light, and the gold of Arthur’s eyes as he steps onto the sandy island, regarding her with fear and concern.

Kaia braces herself and tries to sit up. Vertigo makes the cavern spin, but she manages to stay upright.

“Your brother has been poisoned,” she tells him. “He’s alive, but in coma. You should take him quickly.”

Arthur’s brows furrow as his gaze flickers to his brother, before they rest back on her as if afraid to look away for too long.

“Take him, Arthur. Go far away.”  

He watches her for a moment more, then sighs, running a hand over his dark hair. Then he takes a device from his waist and calls the guard, describing their position. When it was finished, he steps gingerly past her to kneel by his brother.

“Poison?” Arthur repeats.

“He was attacked in the water. They looked like…crabs.” Her fingers twitched in memory at her lap: the crack of shells under her palm, the glinting red eyes looking at her with hate. “Why did you leave?” she asks.

“Why were you in the water?” he parries back.

She supposes she was the more suspicious, and aware that they had precious little time before his guards might arrive, she recounts what happened, about the divers and Stephen Shin – whose name elicits the requisite alarm in him – and the attack on the water.

“And the whirlpool?” Arthur prompts when she hesitates. A look of sympathy crosses his face. “There was no way you could’ve swam against that. My brother isn’t a light burden and this place nearly impossible to find.”

She sighs shakily. “I had help.” At his confusion, she forges on. “I didn’t have a choice. There were divers in the lighthouse, and I couldn’t hang on to the rocks forever.” He stares at her, and when she meets his eyes he understands. Before he could say his alarmed thoughts, Kaia cuts him off. “Why did you leave?” she repeats.

“Dad saw the military while he and Harold were on the way out of town. It took him some time to find out why. As soon as the name Atlantis came up, he warned me. Apparently, two vacationing nephews of the new principal had gone hiking and found at least one of the missing guards. One of them works in the government. He gave the tip off.”

Water splashes behind them, heralding the arrival of a contingent of guards. She shivers at the sight of their familiar armor – _fire in the water, two guards swimming toward her, the water roaring in her ears_ – and they pause at the sight of her, uncertain, until Arthur gestures at them to hurry. Their attention turns toward the unconscious prince, and she clenches her hands in her lap to keep them still. They were not after her now. They did not recognize her.

But her heart still beat with fear as she remembers. Everything had been disorienting then, and the woman was wild with freedom when she pulled Diana’s car into the water, taking Kaia deep into the sea until her lungs were bursting and her body weak by the thrashing of the current. Only when her heart stuttered did she turn back with alarm, making for land, to be faced with the same armored guards and their unfamiliar weapons. She knows she killed them somehow, that their bodies’ discovery was technically her fault, but no one was thinking clearly then. She only had the strength left to climb the pier, and if Orm had not taken her hand, they would both have fallen into the sea.

It was all a mess now.

She’s jerks awake from her reverie, blinking in momentary confusion at Arthur kneeling at her side.

“Let them have a look at that,” he says, already reaching for her wounds.

“Leave them, they’re not fatal,” she tells him. “Tend to your brother.”

Arthur jerks his head over his shoulder, where his brother was being cared for. “They’re drawing out the poison now. Thankfully, it’s not fatal either, though that’s scary by itself. They might’ve been intending to bring him back alive for something worse.”

Kaia remembers what she had meant to ask all this time. “Why are they after him?” Arthur hesitates, but Kaia persists. “Come on, Arthur.”

“It’s not something to be discussed here.”

And he turns away, but finds himself caught by the arm by Kaia’s grip. He instinctively pulls away, and is startled when he couldn’t. He looks up and shivers at the gold that had entered Kaia’s eyes, mirrors of his own.

“He said he sent the tidal wave.”

“He told you that?” he asks incredulously.

Kaia is insistent. “But only the king of Atlantis may do that. But he isn’t the king. You are.”

Arthur glances back over his shoulder at the two men standing guard over the two tending to Orm. Their faces were hidden by the helmets – it was difficult to say where they were looking.

Arthur sighs and lowers his voice, speaking slowly. “I have only been king for less than a month. Before that, Orm was, and he had decided to declare war on the surface for the damage sustained by the seas. He did send the tidal wave, but really –” He brings up his other hand to grip the one she used to keep him in place, “Orm saw it as the only way to save his people. For Atlantis, that involves the bloody end of a trident. He’s not completely evil. I mean, he even saved you, as you said, and he _hates_ the surface.”

Kaia searches his face, then finally releases him. This time, it is Arthur who hesitates, and Kaia sees his genuine concern for his brother.

“I’m human, Arthur, I can’t completely condone what he’s done. Or worse still, what he _could’ve_ done, if he’d succeeded,” she tells him, raising a hand to slide his hold off her. “But my work also inclines me to think that a king who raises arms in defense of his people is worth the benefit of the doubt.”

A shadow passes over his face, but when he does not voice it, she continues, “What will you do now?”

“I can’t bring him back to Atlantis. It’ll only be a matter of tiem before he’s rescued by separatists or assassinated by the Brine and Fishermen. And he can’t stay here, not with Atlanna’s sudden return and your appearance about to raise suspicion.” Arthur runs a hand through his hair, leaning back. “I’ll have to call the League.”

 

 

It shouldn’t surprise her that Diana is part of this League. She had guessed that her acquaintance with Arthur went beyond simple friendship. What did surprise her – and worried her – was that Diana did not speak to her, despite her long conversation over the phone with Arthur.

Arthur’s eyes keep darting towards her, but Kaia can only catch bits and pieces. It was possible that Atlantean technology compensated for heightened senses, for the sake of privacy. Finally, she turns away to look at the water, feeling the chill creep into her skin with detached discomfort. The exhaustion too is only like an afterthought, and she wonders if that’s adrenaline or the changes in her body.

Her ears prick when Arthur addresses the guards, asking after his brother. Good news relieve them both, and Kaia hears his footfalls return to her. He sits heavily at her side, arms propped on his knees, looking out at the water.

“Bruce is on his way.” At her blank look, he clarifies. “Bruce Wayne, also known as the Batman. He has a manor inland. Secluded and well-guarded. You’ll both be safe there.”

She only nods, and they sink into silence. It was not completely comfortable. She could tell Arthur was swallowing his questions, and after a while, she sighs. “What?”

“You _are_ okay, aren’t you?”

She’s been expecting the questions, but she still hadn’t found the right words. “It’s like suddenly having a masters in a field I don’t remember studying, and knowing how to ride a bike without ever getting on one. If I stop thinking, it’s just there.”

“And earlier in the water? How did you do it?” he asks, a crease between his brows.

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure that was really me.”

His eyes search her face, then a smile breaks over his face, brilliant in the dim light. “Well, where you’re going, there might be answers. Just hang on a bit more.”

Kaia has been determined not to feel sorry about herself for the past few days. “There’s always risk in my work. People die, under unstable ruins or old traps. Infection. Disease.” She gives a crooked smile back. “I don’t think there’s precedent over this, though, unless you’re hiding several other dead historians.”

“No. God, no,” he says. “Anyway, if you fought the Brine soldiers, at the very least, you’d be very hard to kill now.”

She gives him an odd look.

“Diana knew from the beginning you might experience…some changes.” He pauses, then, “Barry was hit by lightning and now he’s faster than sound. Victor was melded into alien technology and now he’s half machine. You’ll meet them at the manor. They’re part of the League.”

“I don’t think this is like that.”

“I think it is. But don’t worry. Everyone will help, and Diana is going to baby you even more now,” Arthur muses. “Or be the strictest mom ever. She’ll want to test what you can do.” He grins suddenly. “I wonder if she’ll use the Amazon bit on you. She did it with us once and Barry nearly broke his spine and Bruce was almost decapitated by a six-hundred-year-old sword.”

Maybe her face gave her away, and he waves it off.

“I’m joking. Mostly. She said she’ll meet you at the manor, by the way.”

“Has she or your mom found out anything about the woman in the sarcophagus?”

He rubs the back of his head. “No. I asked that too, earlier, but they can’t seem to find anything about it. There’s a lot of records to go through though, so I’m sure they’ll find something.”

She had a feeling they wouldn’t, but it was still worth a try.

The device between them in the sand beeps, and Arthur picks it up, scanning through the interface. “Bruce is here,” he tells her. He gets up to his feet, and proffers a hand. She takes it, brushing at her torn pants.

He calls out instructions to the guards behind them, then turns to Kaia. “We’ll have to swim out. Do you need help?”

Kaia eyes the water, thinking. “I don’t…think so. I got here, didn’t I?”

“I guess,” he says. “But I’ll stay close to you, just in case.”

Or make sure she doesn’t disappear.

She nods, and they watch the guards lift Orm between them and disappear into the water. Arthur makes for the edge of the island, and suddenly Kaia is afraid. What she’d done earlier was a distant memory, only half remembered. She wasn’t really thinking then, letting her body take over for survival. Now it feels likes there’s too many thoughts in her head, heavy enough to drown her.

Arthur holds out a hand, and Kaia steps beside him, the water lapping at her bare feet. A shiver runs through her spine, and she could hear tiny voices in her head, whispering, darting here and there. A pair of small fish splashes nearby.

Arthur pulls her into the water.

 

 

It was good to have Arthur there. As soon as the water came over her head, she forgot what exactly they were doing, or where they were going. It was loud, a thousand voices in her ears. She inhales sharply, then panics when she realizes she’s underwater, but it was as if in air anyway. Arthur grasps her wrist, seeing her flounder. They went deep, toward the sea floor, then over the small opening and back again toward the sky.

They began as faint shapes in her vision, shadows in the water. She shuts her eyes, shaking her head to clear it. When she opens them, she saw the shapes for what they were: bodies floating in the water, sinking toward them. Men, women, children, blocking out what little light there was. Arthur kicks and they swim up, up, and Kaia could see their blank eyes.

 _Kyria_ , a deep voice whispers in her ear. _Remember your promise_.

They break out into the air. The sudden brightness was disorienting. Her heart was loud in her chest, but she could breathe well enough. How long had they been underwater? Two, three minutes? Arthur’s gold eyes had been watching her the whole time, but now he grins and sticks up his thumb.

The air stirs above them, though the black jet starting to descend into the small outcropping shielded by a wall of rock on one side is quiet. Beside them in the water were the guards bearing Orm toward land, while even more guards rise to create a defensive half circle around them. Her eyes dart around for a military boat or errant divers, but there were none.

The jet lands into the narrow sand strip, and the back opens to let a man armored in black stride out, cape snapping in the wind. Behind him was an older man, grey-haired pushed neatly back, in a Sunday sweater and pressed pants, pausing at the door. He shivers at the cold. It was still drizzling, a mere break in the storm. She knew it would pour again toward evening.

Arthur pulls her along toward the black armored man. Closer, she could see the sharp ears carved into the mask, and his identity becomes clear.

“Bruce,” Arthur greets jovially, clasping the man on the shoulder.

“Arthur,” the Batman answers evenly, his expression hidden. “What have you been up to?”

“Did Diana explain?” he asks. “This is Kaia, her friend from work.”

It was odd shaking hands with a man dressed as a bat, but she supposed it wasn’t any stranger than what’s been happening that past week alone.

“And your brother?” Bruce prompts. It must be automated, his voice. The robot sound of it held little inflection.

Arthur nods at the guards, who lifted Orm to shore on a kind of stretcher made from interwoven strips of malleable material.

“They’ve taken out the poison,” Arthur tells him, “but he’ll be weak for the next few days, so be patient about the mood swings. The poison was meant to incapacitate Atlanteans specifically. He was just getting used to land too.”  

“I don’t babysit,” Bruce says. This time, Kaia can hear the disapproval in his voice.

“He’s a bit more dangerous than a baby.”

Definitely disapproval, almost poisonous. “I’m providing lodging, not a jail cell.”

Kaia shifts, wondering if should’ve gone when she could. She didn’t want to burden anyone any further than she already has.

The tension is cut when the older man from earlier steps past Bruce and offers a blanket to Kaia. She stares at it for a moment, uncomprehending.

“Rain is about to break out again,” he tells them all, jerking his chin toward the rumbling sky. “Perhaps we can discuss this later.”

The tone makes her shiver, conjuring old memories. _Her_ memories. Who was this man? His voice reminded her of the old family retainers – efficient, level, and just a little dry.

Bruce nods once, gesturing toward the jet. Arthur considers him for a moment further, before signaling to the guards. The man who’d offered her the blanket leads them inside.

“I’ll try to be there by tonight,” Arthur says.

“You’re not coming?” she asks him in surprise, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders. She hadn’t been bothered before, but under the warm cloth, she realizes how cold she is, the tips of her fingers turning blue.

He shakes his head. “I need to make sure there aren’t any more bodies floating around for Stephen to find, and I’ll set up a watch for the area, see if I can learn anything else.” He notices her uncertain expression. “Don’t worry, Bruce doesn’t bite. Much.”

“I’m perfectly civil, Arthur,” Bruce says, though Kaia doesn’t fail to notice his fist jerks at his side. Did not the League get along well? “I’ll let you know if anything comes up on the searches. We already know who’s in direct command here, but not who’s making the orders up top.”

He reaches behind him, then tosses a small black device toward Arthur, who catches it easily. He quirks an eyebrow. “Yeah, about the last one…”

“Lost in the sea?” Bruce guesses. “Use that to contact me from now on.”

“Right,” Arthur chuckles. “See you, Bruce. I’ll make it up to you. Whatever you want, gold doubloons – we got dozens of shipwrecks from the Spanish galleon – or –”

Something like sly curiosity enters Bruce’s monotonic voice. “A look at those guns your guards have would be fine.”

“Ah, should’ve guessed.” Arthur gestures at one of the guards returning from the jet, sans their patient. He points to the gun, and the guards it to him, who then hands it to Bruce. “There. Be careful, though.”

“Always.”

“You too,” Arthur says, looking at Kaia. “If he’s being scary, just tell Diana.”

Kaia raises a hand, but he’s already knee-high into the sea. He sinks into the water, then darts away, leaving behind only the ripple of water.

Thunder rumbles, and rain begins to fall down in earnest once more.

“Well, then,” Bruce says, turning toward her with a curious incline of his head. “Shall we?”

Kaia glances back at the sea. She was certain Arthur was far away by now. If she jumped, this Batman wouldn’t be able to follow her into the water, being only human. She should do it now, before things became more complicated. She didn’t even know how far inland his manor was, if there was water nearby.

It was inevitable, but even as the Batman – Bruce – walks back to the jet, leaving deep furrows in the sand that are easily washed away by the pouring rain, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t leave Orm with them, defenseless, even if Arthur trusted this man. And Diana was waiting at the manor, and maybe she would have news, so that Kaia doesn’t have to leave.

She turns her back to sea, telling herself she should at least find out where everyone is, so she has somewhere to go back to, after she fixes this mess.

 


End file.
